Li Xiangming’s art has undergone a process of figurative, abstract and semi-abstract paintings. This description seems like a tradition of modern art, but for Li Xiangming it is true. His art is like a growing tree cropping up from the ground, embracing life and sunlight, then returning to the soil, but it is no longer the soil that is embedded in native country, conversely it is the soil of historical and cultural memories. If Li Xiangming has never come out of the mountainous areas, he might be still a rustic painter. He is not a quiet rustic painter, rather like a farmer aspiring at urban life, he bid farewell to his native country to seek modern art, but he does not give up his rustic inspirations when pursuing modern art. He began to explore artistic forms in 1980s turning from realist rustic style to primitive rustic one. Primitivism contains both form and life, while Li Xiangming endows life into forms. He walks out of rustic land, but his memory still lingers there, and the transformation of rustic land will contain his life memory.Li Xiangming’s abstract works two elements are included: one is life memory, other is aspiration for modern art. The later is explicit, the former implicit. Viewed from the surfaces, Li Xiangming’s abstract paintings stress more on the essence of design and sense of form, looking like pristine and composed, the harmony of warm colors always constitutes the basic tone of works. At this phrase Li Xiangming explored the modern art, he neither ran after the cultural specification in abstraction nor expressed individuality and emotions meticulously. Like early modernist, he focuses on the composition of pictorial surfaces and combination of forms. It is a process of his own transformation from realism to abstraction, keeping on fighting against his own resistance. At this period, he never thinks of the possibility of combining realism with abstraction, but like realist conception, tries to perfect the pictorial surfaces. It is a kind of tradition that painters are unwilling to cast away, but Li Xiangming’s perfection derives from his hidden life memory, a harmony of warm colors, especially brown harmony always reminds one of yellow earth and northern villages, running mountains and overspreading endless plains. Li Xiangming thinks this relation comes from the training of realist painting, a kind of color relation that couldn’t be thrown away, particularly this generation of painters is affected either by The Traveling Art Exhibits painting or by European classicist painting. In his inner deep, however, he is affected by life itself, as yellow earth is just like his life, that enormous brown surfaces seem merged into his life. Such deep psychology is not definitely noticed, and his asserted consciousness is to bid farewell to tradition and create modern. To bid farewell to tradition indeed means to bid farewell to oneself. Li is distinct from general academic artists, he does not accept realist painting training within academy, but realism is his own selection. Art, technique, fate, and life are so contained in this selection that he couldn’t rebel himself. The more he makes perfect abstract art, the more he is involved into the division of self and personality. It is a process of Li Xiangming saying goodbye to yellow earth, and to self, under a flow of brushstrokes and harmonious colors are suppressed a desire of narration.Abstract painting hides narration, but it only expresses a quite different motive. Li Xiangming as a painter of making realism for years couldn’t get rid of narration, what he tries to shake off is old narration, picture and imaged prose, of course the identity of yellow earth. For him, narration means not only a return of language but also a memory of life. This life may not refer to remembrances of early life or some forgotten in a childhood, but to life progress and spiritual fission, depression and suffering, enlightenment and sudden understanding, thinking and creation, etc. Because he yearns for modernity, he comes to metropolis, entering modernity but living a village as city that it seems that he watch modernity and metropolis. So, personal experience, will, feeling and knowledge are absorbed into his paintings, abstract form is endowed with concrete content, thus his abstraction becomes a cultural abstraction from the abstraction of visual form. His abstraction bears personal experience and existential consciousness, which to some extent is a kind of symbolic abstraction. This symbolism is not a definite sign, but it implies a state of survival by titles. Survival has two meanings: both personal experience and wholly cultural state, which are sometimes tangled together. In his works what could be easily recognized is calligraphic Chinese characters, such as Symbolic East - Landscape Sealing-Up (2004) and Symbolic East - Cultural Planting (2004). Calligraphic abstract beauty is always concerned by abstract artists, and endowed with “abstract nationalization”. Li Xiangming appropriates calligraphy from the same perspective, but he doesn’t actually look for the abstract beauty of calligraphy, rather for more profound connotations. In fact, Li Xiangming’s formal abstraction has reached a high level, he doesn’t need calligraphy to prove his “abstract” ability, for him calligraphy means “eastern symbol”, like what he says that “the tendency and reality of ‘globalization’-‘integration’ context make local culture audiences become vigilant against and suspect colonist culture”. To insist on a local cultural stance against the pressure of globalization is a kind of cultural strategy to take part in globalization organically, thus abstraction and calligraphy, global and local seem to be unified into Li Xiangming’s works. It is an important turn since he refers to western modern art to explore abstract art for long time, so he finds a “legal” content for his abstract art. It is true that Li Xiangming is not an extrovert artist essentially, so this superficial grand narrative couldn’t cover up his inner conflicts. His other works don’t have this narrative of “globalization and localization”, but personal tensions of psychology and spirit. Pictorially, it is a conflict of formal freedom and spiritual tension, which is also what moves audience in his works. His paintings throw off gradually the painterly, decorative abstraction, so lines, colors, obscure images, and cultural symbols are composed together at liberty, while the whole tendency is the confrontation between restraints and break-away.Li Xiangming is in such contradiction forever, harmony, structure, and narrative are the restraints upon him by the tradition he has learnt, broken pieces, break-away, and coarseness are his fight against this tradition. In his paintings you couldn’t find out-of-tune colors or dissociative compositions, such as Game Rules (2002), but several lines move at random in the centripetal structure, some coarse traces reveal an unsuppressed desire against harmony. This imagery of images in abstract structures implies psychological symbolism, which is both a temptation of modern life and the summons of the artist’s own primitive instinct. Nonetheless, all these are covered up by his grand titles of globalization, which is only an enlarged object. His “east” should be his hidden self. This is what I feel when I have seen his recent paintings exhibition, for I have seen his past works, talked to him, and debated. He has painted such long time by experiencing such dramatic changes, but he still walks on, from mountainous area to city, from the country to modernity, and also turns round to have a look when going forward. All walking ahead and turning round are imprinted in his works deeply.