Bolero Western Restaurant

Taiwanese artist Lin Li-li’s mineral pigment on silk paintings artworks have a misty and nostalgic atmosphere. When facing her works, the viewer’s impressions and thoughts are frozen deep in memory. Her use of colour is simple and elegant, with brushstrokes that gradually blur. Her compositions convey  a sense of time, transporting the scenery into the past. Although not too distant, these memories are already fading. The subject matter of her works is drawn from personal life experiences. With a nostalgic sentiment, Lin Li-li observes her surroundings. Scenes that are often mundane or seemingly unworthy of painting, in her hands, take on an unique charm. Whether it’s a corner of a room with a staircase and two chairs, a shop corner, an old house, or the ferry pier depicted with two banks of a river, everything is tranquil. This allows the viewer to recall images from their memory that resonate with the painting, leading to a drifting sense of contemplation, where both the viewer and the painting seem to merge, and in time forget each other.

Lin Lil-i holds both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Tunghai University, Taichung, a significant centre for Taiwanese Gouache (also known as Nihonga) painting. Her works are vastly different from the fine and colourful style commonly associated with medium. In BOLERO (Bolero Western Restaurant, known as Taiwan’s first Western restaurant) of 2024, the tables, chairs, potted plants, stairs, and walls within the restaurant seem shrouded in mist, as if dampened by water. Time has already blurred things, yet the restaurant’s former glory still lingers. The current emptiness does not diminish the past scenes of crowds. The dim yellow tones evoke the bewilderment felt when the music stops, and the people have dispersed.