Having the faith in the power of Xie Yi, the freehand style of an outstanding school in traditional Chinese painting, Li Shinan has devoted himself to freehand figure painting with splash-ink and splash-color manner for decades, with which combining the western or modern artistic language. He tends to look for forms from the unraveled the structures of landscape, flowers and figures, which will later be rearranged by the freehand spirit and brush-and-ink language, for the purpose of achieving the “no trace” state, the essence in Chinese traditional culture spiritually accents the alienation and separation from the past; this is a sort of split between the strong desires of the contemporary, including the painter himself, living in cities yet longing for retreating to mountains and the fact that they are trapped in cages for a long time thus can never return to nature. Li wrote in this note of the Mountains:“perhaps people tend to escape, so they are living in metropolis yet longing for mountain. However, for us living in reality, to escape is only a dream. Hence we decide to self-exile for defending the human dignity. Consequently, the phrase ’life in the mountians’ came into my mind. What a poetic but ironic phrase! As a result, I obscured the characteristic of times and genders. It seems that all the figures are dancing with bald heads, bared feet and in robes. The masks cover their whole faces expect eyes; surfaces could be hidden while emotions flow. As a matter of fact, human is actually a symbol, a spiritual symbol. The emotion of human is that of mountain”