Li Shuang (artist)

Li Shuang (李爽, born 1957 in Beijing), is a contemporary Chinese artist.

Li Shuang’s works testify to her painful personal and artistic journey. She grew up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution within a family of intellectuals. Her early childhood artistic development was influenced by her grandfather, a dealer in Chinese antiques, books and art.

During the Chinese political reformation and opening up in the late ninetieth, “Li Shuang” was a household name in the art industry in France and other European countries. On a superficial level, the romantic story between Li and her husband might account for the reopening of art in isolated China due to Cultural Revolution. More specifically, Western media described “Li Shuang Incident” as the precursor and advocator of the emerging Chinese modern behavior art.

Li Shuang was born in Beijing in 1957. Both of her parents were sophisticatedly educated and graduated for Beijing University, one of the top institutions in China. During her childhood, she was majorly influenced by her grandfather, an antiques, books and art works trader who traveled between Asian and Western countries. However, after the Cultural Revolution took place in Beijing, her family was deteriorated by the “Red Army”. She recalled” It was a cold winter at my age of 13, I was sitting on a square chair in the house, staring at my father’s working desk. He has been imprisoned and interrogated by the local academy for 3 months because of his storage of foreign literature and art work. All the possessions were confiscated and the house filled with emptiness and solitary. I wanted to draw the table on a paper, as if my father was using it to read and write. Since then, I picked up the brush and stepped on the path of drawing, even until now.”

Since Li Shuang graduated from high school in 1976, she and her schoolmates were deported to the rural area of Beijing and started farming for the next three years. During her spare time, Li kept practicing drawing and studying art for her ambition to attend professional art school. However, due to her special family background (Father was charged), Li’s dream did not come true in the end. Fortunately, she was discovered later by some of her artworks and accepted into China National Youth Theater as a stage designer. Then she became well-known of her contribution to the academy.

In 1979, together with Ma Desheng, Wang Keping, Huang Rui, Qu Leilei, Ah Cheng and Ai Weiwei, Li Shuang founded the Stars Group (XingXing), an assembly of untrained, experimental artists who challenged the strict tenets of Chinese politics. As a political and artistic group, they staged exhibitions around Beijing, making way for avant-garde art in China. Li Shuang was the only female artist founder of the Stars. Li exhibited in both the historic shows of 1979 and 1980. Her works were featured in all the Stars group shows, The Stars: Ten Years, 1989 (Hanart Gallery, Hong-Hong and Taipei), Demand for Artistic Freedom, The Stars 20 Years, 2000 (Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo) and the retrospective exhibition in Beijing in 2007: Origin Point (Today Art Museum, Beijing). According to “NewYork Time”, she was described as the most intellectual female artist in the era of post-Cultural Revolution in China.

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