Li Jiaen’s Mountains Ablaze, 2007, with thick red-leaved trees across the centre and right and pale green hills and water opening on the left

Mountains Ablaze by Li Jiaen, original oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm — view 2

Mountains Ablaze by Li Jiaen, original oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm — view 3

Mountains Ablaze by Li Jiaen, original oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm — view 4

Mountains Ablaze by Li Jiaen, original oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm — view 5

Mountains Ablaze by Li Jiaen, original oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm — view 6

Emerging

Mountains Ablaze

Name: Mountains Ablaze
Brand: Paint For Heart
Price: 1116.0 SGD
Availability: OutOfStock

Artist Li Jiaen

Creation Date 2007

Material Oil on canvas

Size 50 x 60 cm

Category original

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Current total $1,116.00

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Perspectives

A closer look

Artwork Notes

Art appreciation

The red trees advance from the right and spread towards the centre, their branches almost reaching the viewer. Dark trunks divide near the bottom and support the canopy with diagonal limbs. At the left, a strip of water and a pale hillside lead towards a softer distance. The composition sets the edge of the wood between the dense near trees and a landscape that remains open beyond them.

Li works entirely with the palette knife. Red, orange, ochre, violet-black, and green are pressed into thick facets, then joined by short dragging movements. Some deposits keep the sharp edge of the blade; others mix into cooler colour beneath. The right side carries the greatest weight of paint, while the distant left is thinner and broader. Material thickness becomes a measure of depth as well as foliage.

The title's sense of colour spreading across the mountains is built through interruption rather than a single blanket of red. Dark branches, green leaves, violet shadow, and pale sky continually divide the warm canopy and give it direction. Li grew up amid the folk culture and Kunqu traditions of the Yangtze River Delta, later bringing their colour and staged rhythms into his painting. There are no performers here, yet the rise and fall of knife marks and the opening between near and far retain a strong sense of visual orchestration.

Theme

Style and context

Expressive methods in modern Chinese landscape painting can intensify colour and material while preserving the visible world. Trees, slope, and water can remain spatially coherent while colour and material gain greater independence. Mountains Ablaze holds that balance. From a distance, it reads as an autumn hillside; at close range, each knife mark is felt as a separate act of pressure, overlap, or release.

Li Jiaen's exclusive use of the palette knife gives the surface a shallow relief. It also provides a way to translate the decorative order of Kunqu colour and garden space into oil paint. He places the warmest, thickest canopy near the viewer and reserves cooler, thinner passages for the left-hand distance. Observed terrain and material rhythm therefore carry the work together.

Artist Profile

About the artist

Li Jiaen (born 1947, Shanghai) is a Chinese oil painter and a member of the Shenzhen branch of the China Artists Association. He grew up within the folk-opera culture of the Yangtze River Delta, an environment that shaped his lifelong interest in traditional theatrical imagery and its movement, colour, and stage presence. His career has centred on translating Chinese opera figures, flower subjects, and Jiangnan cultural memory into oil painting.

Within that practice, he became known for working with the palette knife rather than the brush, a method that distinguishes his mature paintings while remaining secondary to his long engagement with Chinese performing-arts themes. Li Jiaen’s work was exhibited in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2002.

In 2006, his Kunqu opera figure paintings received praise from the playwright Pai Hsien-yung, linking his practice to a wider cultural revival of Kunqu aesthetics.

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