Li Shuang, born in 1957 in Beijing, comes from a family of richly diverse cultural origins: her mother descends from uprooted Tibetan nobility exiled to the coastal province of Shandong, while her father belonged to a family of intellectuals persecuted during the successive political campaigns in China.
This mix shaped both her resilience and her artistic journey. Briefly a set designer at the National Youth Theatre, she was dismissed in 1979 for joining the very first Chinese avant-garde art group, the Stars, and for participating in its artistic and political actions.
In 1981, she was arrested by the police on the charge of cohabitation with a foreigner. During her incarceration, she refused to denounce her fellow members of the Stars group, which led to a two- year prison sentence, half of which she spent in solitary confinement. Shortly before her sentence was completed, she was released following an intervention by French President François Mitterrand.
In 1984, she moved to Paris to marry her fiancé, Emmanuel Bellefroid, and settled there permanently. After her release, the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs adopted new, more flexible regulations regarding marriages between Chinese citizens and foreigners.
Since 2007, Li Shuang has lived in a small forest village near Fontainebleau, where she finds renewed inspiration in the nature she holds dear. After 2020, she published several books in Chinese, including Celebrating Death and Return Across the Seas of Sand.
Her uncensored autobiography, Shuang 爽 , published to great success in China in 2013, bears witness to her courage in the face of adversity, while her artistic vision continues to illuminate her path: “Art, a gift from the stars, carries within it an awakened consciousness—a flame to preserve in every moment of creation.”