Sun and Moon in Harmony

A massive snow mountain fills most of the canvas, its blue-indigo body rising from the centre toward the upper left. The summit catches a band of warm amber light where snow and sunlight merge into a pale golden crest, while the mountain below falls into deep violet and indigo, the cold tones conveying the sheer weight of rock and ice at altitude. In the lower-right corner, a small meadow painted in blue-green sits in the mountain's shadow. On it, a scattering of yaks moves in loose groups, two figures in red headscarves stand among them, and a small hut marks a trace of human life.

Li Tiexiang builds the mountain through layers of blue, purple, and white, giving it volume through colour temperature rather than drawn outlines. The snow peaks are the brightest part of the painting — where warm light meets cold surface in thick, near-white strokes. Below the crest the colour deepens through violet into indigo, and the brushwork loosens as the mountain mass recedes. The meadow is painted in the same blue family as the mountain's shadow, so it reads not as a separate foreground but as an extension of the cold terrain. The yaks and figures are kept to a few economical marks — enough to suggest life, but not enough to draw the eye away from the mountain.

The moon hangs luminous in the upper sky, but the sun never appears — only its warmth, visible as that amber band along the ridge. Moonlight and unseen sunlight exist together in the same picture, giving it its title and its atmospheric logic: this is how light behaves at high altitude, where day and night are not so sharply divided. The red headscarves, the hut, the meadow, the moon, and the snow crest all circle around the mountain as their centre, and the whole composition sets human and celestial presence against the permanence of stone and ice. Oil on canvas, 104 × 78 cm.