Green Grass Touching the Sky: Li Fang’s Works on Paper
M+M Gallery is honored to announce the solo exhibition of post-war Asian art pioneer Li Fang (1933–2020), Green Grass Touching the Sky: Li Fang’s Works on Paper, opening on May 28 , 2026. Following the artist's first institutional retrospective, Autumn Grasses Sooth the Heart: Li Fang’s Nomadic Brushwork (curated by Pi Daojian) at the Guangdong Museum of Art in 2026, this marks Li Fang's inaugural solo exhibition in Hong Kong. The exhibition focuses on her works fromthe 1960s during her relocation to Europe, featuring a select presentation of ten works encompassing watercolor, ink and color, and oil on paper.
As the sole female founding member of the Fifth-Moon Group, Li Fang moved to France in 1959 and subsequently settled in Ticino, Switzerland. During the 1960s—the pivotal decade highlighted in this exhibition—she resided at the heart of post-war European avant-garde art, yet chose to maintain a geographical and spiritual detachment from the tumultuous art trends of the time. This state of seclusion allowed her to deeply integrate her innate Eastern calligraphic sensibilities with Western Lyrical Abstraction within the microscopic realms of Xuan paper and cotton paper, distilling a purely individual spiritual consciousness that synthesizes bodily rhythm and metaphysical meditation.
On the parallel axes of art history, Li Fang's practice on paper initiates a covert, transregional dialogue with the explorations of post-war Western female abstraction masters such as Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler.
In terms of visual expression, Li Fang’s works from the 1960s share a wild and urgent "action" quality with Joan Mitchell. Mitchell's celebrated practice lay in transforming a "remembered landscape" into color fields and lines fraught with psychological tension. Similarly, Li Fang’s exhibited works from the 1960s spontaneously condensed the cultural shock of her arrival in Europe into storm-like, intertwining lines of deep blue and ink on paper. Yet, unlike Mitchell’s Western mode of emotional catharsis, Li Fang's brushwork consistently embodies the calligraphic principle of gufa yongbi (the structural use of the brush), maintaining an inherent sense of structure and self-discipline amidst the frenzy.
Moving into the 1970s and 1980s, Li Fang’s precise control over the permeation and diffusion of moisture on Xuan paper creates an intriguing intertextuality with Helen Frankenthaler’s "soak-stain" technique. While Frankenthaler created luminous, mist-like fields of transparent color by pouring thinned oil paint onto unprimed canvas, Li Fang harmonized with the unique, microscopic breathing of Eastern paper. Utilizing watercolor and ink, she conjured a translucent, fluid sense of atmosphere on the surface. Distinguishing herself from Western female artists who asserted dominance over space on canvas, Li Fang introduced traditional elements of liubai (leaving blank space) and dianjing (adding focal dots or figures) into her 1980s works. Here, color transforms into the breath of cosmic rhythm, sublimating the memory of landscape into a state of profound Eastern contemplation where self and object dissolve.
Piercing through grand historical narratives, Green Grass Touching the Sky offers an intimate encounter between paper, ink, and brush, bearing witness to a female artist's solitary journey and spiritual transcendence across Eastern and Western cultures.
