 i Shuang's images are quiet meditations on life, just like the person Li Shuang. Her 20 paintings of Buddha like figures, with small eyes, long faces and ear lobes and serene expressions can now be seen at the Cave Arts Center in Shanghai. 
The show, which runs through April 6, is a homecoming of sorts for Li Shuang, one of China's pioneering contemporary artists. She was part of the "Stars" group that was formed in the late 1970s in Beijing. They were untrained artists like Huang Rui, Wang Keping and Ai Wei Wei. Li Shuang was the only female member of the group. And like Wang Keping, she eventually moved to France, with her husband Emmanuel Bellefroid.
Now, nearly 30 years after her paintings shocked the Beijing art scene, she is back in China with a major solo exhibition of her works, a long-running series of images of chocolate skinned Buddha-like figures. The paintings are simple, which is part of Li Shuang's message. The backgrounds are decorated with flowers or soft lights. The focus is on a figure whose eyes are downcast, lips persed, and position perfectly balances and erect.
When Li Shuang left China in the mid 1980s, the country's economic run was just beginning.  The student movements would come later, as would the march of capitalism. Li Shuang, however, has turned inward. Her early works were very much in tune with her era, bold colors, sharp lines, chaotic features and emboldened by a sense of energy and strength. See ArtZineChina's profile of Li Shuang. But her later works are simpler, quieter, more reflective and very out of tune with the time, as if Li Shuang has disappeared into soft meditation and found a sense of spirituality in the world. She is 51 years old now and has told the story of her turbulent life in books and articles, about how she was jailed in the early 1980s for living with a foreigner in Beijing.
Now, that is no longer a crime in Beijing. And China has embraced all things foreign. Li Shuang, it seems, went abroad, but has embraced something that is deeply rooted in Asia: the expressionless expression that says more than mere words.
Flowers, Birds & You, 195 x 114 cm, 2007
Peace, Oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm, 2007
Apricot Flowers in the Fragrant, Oil on canvas, 130 x 65 cm, 2007
Pine Tree & Crane, Oil on canvas, 195 x 130 cm, 2007
Pure Feeling of Holiness, Oil on canvas, 130 x130cm, 2007
Bambous with Moss, Oil on canvas, 162 x 130cm, 2007
Endless Mountains, Oil on canvas, 130 x 70cm, 2007
Facing Each Other from Two Shores, Oil on canvas, 260 x 162 cm, 2007
Extreme Happiness, No Happiness, Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm, 2007
Change the Good Fortune, Oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm, 2007
Beautiful Scene in A Good Day, Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm, 2007
Eulogy of Profusion, Oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm, 2007
Immortal after Raining, Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm, 2007
A Promise on the Top of A Branch, Oil on canvas, 195 x 97 cm, 2007
|
