Li Songsong, "Oxygen Mask" (2009). Oil on canvas, each panel 83 x 83 in.

“Abstract,” the title of Li Songsong’s solo exhibition of new and recent work at Pace Beijing (on view through January 30), might at first seem an unlikely choice to describe Li’s paintings. Like the artist’s previous works, the 16 paintings on view in “Abstract” are distinctly figurative, transforming photographs, film stills, and other found images into multicolored grids of lush, swirling impasto so thick that it sometimes seems on the verge of melting before one’s eyes. Several of the works take as their point of departure particularly loaded moments in national history or hotly debated current events, but it is through Li’s process of painting — the cool, analytic division of the image into rectangular fragments; the systematic application of paint to panels of canvas or aluminum, from top to bottom, left to right — that the source picture becomes, for the artist, a kind of abstraction. In painting, Li explained to me, the stories surrounding his visual referents are slowly reduced to a whisper, while the finished paintings are imbued with more personal associations and meanings.

Li walks a tightrope throughout the show, between the overt narrative content of his sources and the transfiguration of those images into paintings possessed of a magnetic, forceful, and sometimes uneasy beauty that takes us beyond their particulars. Peach Garden (2008), named for Taipei’s Taoyuan (literally “Peach Garden”) Airport, is a gorgeous, large-scale patchwork of painted aluminum panels depicting crowds gathering around the empty plane of a pilot who defected to Taiwan from the mainland sometime during the 1980s, while a companion piece, Betrayer (2008), shows a pilot who, having just landed, raises his arms in sign of victory. Seen in this context, two other works, the diptych Oxygen Mask and its corollary, Life Raft (both 2009), adapted from illustrations that originally appeared in an airline safety brochure, hint at the dangers that lurk beneath the freedom of flight.

Finally, it is the affect of the figures in the work — almost always central to Li’s paintings — that becomes an abstraction on which the viewer must meditate. This is exemplified by Six Men (2008), which depicts Japanese kamikaze pilots posing before they go into battle. One searches their faces for some sign of fanaticism but finds only blank stares, which congeal, dance, and dissolve in Li’s extraordinary brushwork. Similarly, Public Enemy (2008) is a diptych based, in part, on a newspaper photo of Yang Jia, who killed several police officers last year in suburban Shanghai after having been accused, detained, and allegedly tortured for stealing a bicycle. Here the horizontal bands of color into which the image has been divided seem like distortions occurring on a television in need of tuning — a personal flashpoint of violence abstracted into public spectacle. One looks into Yang’s eyes in search of understanding, but it’s just a painting that returns the viewer’s gaze. Abstraction, it turns out, not only describes the artist’s process of denaturing images. Abstractions — freedom, liberty, martyrdom, and revenge — seem to be the guiding principals by which the protagonists in Li’s extraordinary works live and die.