Li Zhong
BORN: 1963
HOMETOWN: CHINA
LIVES AND WORKS: CHINA
Mr. Li Zhong, also known as Zongxi, was born in 1963 in Nantong City, Jiangsu province. As a child, he loved painting and took up landscape painting with Hu Zhende, a renowned master of northern Jiangsu in 1981. He worked with an art design company and Beijing Calligraphy and Painting Society in the eighties. While on a painting trip to Guilin in 1988, he had the good fortune of receiving guidance from well-known painters such as Yang Taiyang and Chen Yupu. In 1996, he enrolled in the Nanjing Art Academy to study Chinese painting, and in the following year became a private student of venerated landscape master Wang Zhongnian; he was Wang’s only student.
The works of Mr. Li are highly detailed as he deploys a classical style of Chinese ink painting, which goes by the name of “gong-bi”- otherwise known as the meticulous and detailed court-style painting. This goes in contrast to the other school of traditional Chinese painters that use the “Shui-mo” style, which means freehand-style painting. For Li Zhong’s mode of working, it requires great concentration and immaculate precision with the paintbrush. As a result, we can admire the dexterity that goes into Li’s landscape paintings, which often depict greatly textured mountainous views amidst a soft shroud of misty, high-altitude fog; sometimes backlit by the majesty of a setting sun, or perhaps complemented by a bounty of lively trees and vegetation. Water and waterfalls are also a prominent theme in his paintings, whose representation can be a popular one in Chinese fengshui, as it signifies the positive flow of “Chi” in a household.
Li Zhong has won the gold award in the Chinese Art Cup Grand Competition and a First-Class award in the Exquisite Art Exhibition. His name is featured in chapter one of the Dictionary of World-Famous Artists and in Selection of the Award-winning Art Works by World Famous Artists. He is currently a senior artist with the Shanghai Folk Academy of Painting and Calligraphy. His works have been exhibited in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, where they have been warmly received by collectors.