Vegetable #3

This is an image of the humble Chinese cabbage (bok choy or bai cai) magnified to heroic scale, some six feet tall. The tips of the leaves were painted in broad, gestural lines of wet, black ink that has bled in an uncontrolled manner into the absorbent xuan paper, leaving both the original line and a penumbra of saturation around it. To this, the artist has added wet washes of dark ink that have mottled and pooled irregularly on the surface of the leaves. The white base of the vegetable has been left mostly in reserve, with a moderate amount of light side-brush texturing. The roots of the bok choy, still attached, are rendered in dark washes of ink. The painting has been backed with several layers of xuan paper and mounted to a wooden frame.

A tradition of vegetable painting—especially in monochrome ink—dates back at least to the thirteenth century in China. One strain is allegorical, the vegetables standing in for the righteous Confucian scholar beset by petty adversaries. The second has a Chan (J. Zen) Buddhist connotation, the focus on such a mundane subject operating as an emblem of the Buddhist practitioner’s insistence on the centrality of the mundane everyday, in which true enlightenment may be found. Li Jin, who has had a lifelong affinity for Buddhism, seems to be referring to the latter strain, though the formal qualities of the painting show awareness of the former as well. To these connotations, he adds the puckishness of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s sculptures, in which a kind of ironic profundity is achieved through the simple act of magnification.