Explosion of Colour

This book focuses on Li Lei’s abstract painting from the period 2006 to 2016. Important series include Shanghai Flowers, Flames at Pompeii and Memories of the South. Accompanying essays trace his influences, from the twentieth-century Abstract art scene in Shanghai and his childhood in the vast landscapes of China’s northwest, to his knowledge of the Western abstract art theory of Kandinsky, Chinese Buddhist and Daoist philosophy, and the traditional Chinese art forms of poetry and ink painting. Development in Li Lei’s painting is described, and his style identified as philosophically eclectic and ‘moderate’, a distinctively Chinese kind of poetic abstraction.