ART ATTACK!!!! LI SHURUI

Lights #7, 2007, Acrylic on Canvas by Li Shurui courtesy of
Goedhuis Contemporary Gallery



Lights #5, 2007, Acrylic on Canvas by Li Shurui courtesy of
Goedhuis Contemporary Gallery




Lights #78, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas by Li Shurui courtesy of
82 Republic Gallery


Lights #80, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas by
Li Shurui courtesy of 82 Republic


One of Beijing's rising young art stars, Li Shurui is 25 years old and graduated, in 20004, with a degree from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute's Oil Paint department. She currently resides in Beijing and is partnered with painter Chen Jie. Additonal information on Chen Jie can be found via this link.




"Seeing Mountains" installation images courtesy of Li Shurui &
Long March Space

Her art career started while she was an undergraduate with an installation, called "Seeing Mountains", of a long line of fabric cubes that floated across a lake in a remote part of Yunnan Province inhabited by a matriarchal ethnic minority tribe.




Untitled Lights, Acrylic on Canvas, 2007-2008 courtesy of Li Shurui


Untitled Lights, Acrylic on Canvas, 2007-2008 courtesy of Li Shurui


She then developed into large scaled air brushed abstract paintings with a vague international familiarity, but at a recent gallery group show, she had an instillation work consisting of an open elevator stuck between floors illuminated by flourescent lights.

This focus on lights illustrates Ms. Li's obsession with light, especially synthetic lights, manifesting in how her paintings are painstakingly recreated from photographs, enlarged into abstract kaleidescopic images. Examples illustrative of this work are the images at the top of the posting and directly above this paragraph.





Li Shurui photographed by Natalie Behring courtesy of
the New York Times/IHT


When asked in a recent article interview with The International Tribune/New York Times on who inspires her, she mentions "seventh-century ruler Wu Zetian, who through a combination of brains, beauty, unsparing ambition and tenacious hard work, became China's first and only female empress".

By stating such a person as an ispiration does show that Ms. Li is a feminist by nature, even though she has stated that "she is still too young, still too much in the stage of discovering herself, to figure out whether she considers herself a feminist or not."

You can read the IHT/NY Times Article "China's Female Artists Quietly Emerge" via this link and view the accompanying photo slide show via this link.

Ms. Li is represented by the 82 Republic Gallery in Hong Kong and by Godehuis Gallery inernationally (Beijing, London and New York).