Spotlight on Artist WeiHang (Jacky) Li

Welcome to The Elective’s digital art museum, dedicated to the incredible work of AP Arts students. Each week we highlight a work or series created in one of the AP Arts concentrations—AP 2-D Art and Design, 3-D Art and Design, and AP Drawing (the AP Program also offers Art History and Music Theory)—as well as a statement from the artist (and, occasionally, their teacher).

From the first cave paintings to contemporary breakthroughs in virtually reality, art, in all its forms, has been a crucial way for people to process, make sense of, comment on, and grapple with the world around them. In 2020, there is a lot to process and grapple with—and AP Art students have risen to the challenge. The work many of them submitted in their final portfolios is explicitly of the moment, from commentary on the covid-19 pandemic to the celebration of people of color to the nature of heroism in perilous times.

The work is often challenging and provocative but always insightful, inspiring, and expansive.

This week we feature an oil stick-and-propylene work made by WeiHang (Jacky) Li from Nansha College Preparatory Academy in Nansha Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.

Here’s WeiHang’s statement on the work:

“I want to represent the journey that I've been through. After seeing a variety of landscapes I decided to add my own ideas into the place that I once go. When I travel, I see different landscapes. When I recalled these scenes, a large area of color blocks first appeared in my mind. Therefore, I decided to draw the color blocks using crayons and pencils to create the painting.

I used a pencil to draw horizontal lines and outline the color blocks in the painting. After that, the squares were colored with crayons. Finally, I used my fingers to daub the color blocks with other blocks and mix the different colors.

This is the basis of my sustained investigation. The central idea of my creation is my journey. As I was sorting out travel photos, I saw that these recorded the different places that I had been to. These photos should be the basic material to creation and the technique application of oil painting is a key point of research and exploration. Everyone has different scenes in the dream. Sometimes dreams are divorced from reality, sometimes they are closely related to reality. So I combine the expression of color techniques of oil painting with the concept of dream and travel to create the third stage. I paid more attention to the expression of oil painting texture and the continuity of dream content and began to describe the dream ship.”

And here are more works from WeiHang’s portfolio:

Student statements are lightly edited for length and clarity.