Imaginary number Lin Shuchuan (The deputy director of the Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts)

Li Baoxun is such an artist, rather than painting, he is practicing. Practice is a dual superposition of action and thinking. Thinking is the navigation of his actions, actions follow by his thinking, and the final picture is his destination, but this is just a visual result. For a good artist, the result is not the most important thing. This is particularly like a mathematical concept: imaginary numbers.

For centuries before Rene Descartes named the concept in the 17th century, imaginary numbers were thought to be numbers that didn't really exist. As a mathematical concept, it is obscure, mysterious, and difficult to understand. I have no intention of popularizing mathematical concepts here. Perhaps Leibniz’s statement can help us quickly understand the mystery: “Imaginary numbers are subtle and strange refuges for gods to escape. It is probably an amphibious between the worlds of existence and illusion". "In Li Baoxun's works, we can easily identify the "non-existence of reality". Even at any moment your eyes meet the picture, you will have the opportunity to capture "amphibians" what Leibniz said.

This "amphibious" is full of entanglements, entanglements and controversies. It is like a ghost floating in the picture, floating in the space where the picture is located. It constitutes a special atmosphere. It is existence, it is nothingness. It is both existence and nothingness. On the one hand, with the help of your cognitive dimension and frame of reference, it approaches existence infinitely and approximates something infinitely; On the other hand, it quickly moves away and escapes from your frame, Only the remnants or abandonment are left, which eventually manifests as a pool of color blocks, brush strokes and gradually blurred but never-disappearing traces signed by Li Baoxun. Perhaps, this "amphibious" has the inherent sense of destiny that Li Shutong called " Every boat has its own ferry", which is the significance of Li Baoxun's works.

Using a concept like "Critical Region " to name a series of works, or even in a name like "Duality", we can vaguely get a glimpse of the artist's thinking trajectory and behavioral motivations. In the world of computer programming languages, a critical area refers to a shared resource that is only allowed to be used by one process at a time, and this shared resource cannot be accessed by multiple processes at the same time, which means that multiple processes must access it mutually exclusive. This unique representation, this naming method that can be seen everywhere in Li Baoxun's works, also echoes several concepts used by Leibniz in his interpretation of imaginary numbers at a more profound level: "escape", "subtle and strange", and " refuges ".

"Entanglement", "mutual exclusion", "existence", "illusion", "amphibious", etc. are always in Critical Region, the floating and uncertain ghost attributes that are constantly in a superimposed state, almost like blood and genes, exist in these works of Li Baoxun. They are like board members of the same group, jointly investing in and constructing the "imaginary number" feature in artist Li Baoxun's works.