“I am…”: the sentence opens, but never comes to an end.
These two words span nearly fifty years of Li Shuang’s artistic practice. They do not constitute an assertion of a fixed identity, but rather the movement through which every fixed identity is gradually stripped away.
History successively defined her as a child from a family belonging to the “Five Black Categories” during the Cultural Revolution, as an artist of the Stars Group, a political protagonist, a prisoner, and later an exile. Society subsequently assigned her other identities: woman, wife, mother, recognised artist, and even “Eastern artist”. Yet none of these definitions has ever been able to fully contain her true self.
Her entire artistic inquiry has revolved around three questions: how can one preserve one’s authenticity under the weight of history and society? What is true freedom when desire, relationships and achievement shape our existence? And when the body and identity change over time, does there remain an essence of life that endures?
For Li Shuang, painting is neither simply the creation of images nor an autobiographical testimony. It is a practice of life, an exploration of the body, relationships, silence and consciousness. What she sometimes calls the divine, life, consciousness or the natural refers to a broader connection between human beings and the living world. If “I am…” remains unfinished, it is because true existence cannot be confined within any identity.
1. Between the Self, Desire and Rules
Li Shuang was born in Beijing in 1957. Her childhood unfolded during a period of political upheaval that profoundly affected her family’s history. At the age of thirteen, when her father was detained and their home searched by the Red Guards, she sat before his empty desk and suddenly felt the need to paint it as though he were still there.
This is how her painting began: not as a professional choice, but as an inner space capable of preserving what the outside world sought to erase.
Sent to the countryside in 1976, she discovered the rhythm of nature. She observed flowers, mountains and animals, which sought neither to explain themselves nor to become anything else. She understood that life possesses a force that obeys neither politics nor human will: even when wounded or repressed, it continues to seek its own path.
At the age of nineteen, she painted Autoportrait de jeunesse (1976). Confronting her own reflection, she refused to measure her identity according to the criteria of others and sought, behind her face, a truth that could not be reduced to appearance.
In 1979, she co-founded the Stars Group, a pioneering collective in Chinese contemporary art whose concerns extended beyond artistic form: it was about reaffirming the right to look, to express oneself and to choose one’s own path. Art became inseparable from freedom.
In 1981, her relationship with the French diplomat Emmanuel Bellefroid led to her arrest. She refused to deny her feelings or denounce members of the Stars Group. Sentenced to two years of “re-education through labour”, she discovered that external rules eventually penetrate the body, desire and the judgement one passes upon oneself.
Arriving in France in 1983, she encountered another form of exile: that of an image constructed through the gaze of others. In Le Reflet raconté (1984), she cut up and recomposed wrapping papers from wedding gifts, as though reconstructing herself in the process. Désir et hésitation (1985) continues this reflection: female desire appears suspended between freedom, modesty, dependence, love and fear.
2. In Silence, Doubt and Refusal
From the 1980s through the beginning of the 2000s, Li Shuang developed a deeply personal pictorial language. Her women with silent faces are not simply self-portraits: they embody different experiences of consciousness — solitude, desire, waiting, motherhood, protection and inner strength. Her artistic practice developed within the midst of family life, motherhood, economic responsibilities and relationships.
La Questionneuse silencieuse (1996) was created at the moment when Li Shuang was assuming her role as a mother to her two children, Edmond and Armand. Family, maternal responsibilities and a relatively repetitive daily life surrounded her, yet windows began to appear repeatedly in her paintings. Family and artistic creation were no longer opposing realities, but experiences that permeated one another.
With Vent doux, soleil chaleureux (2004), the woman depicted seems to have acquired the capacity to withdraw and observe. Desire has not disappeared, but she no longer needs to prove herself through the gaze of others. Her painting gradually moves closer to freedom.
La Grâce d’Éden (2007–2010) and Le Royaume aux cinq tiges (2009) deepen this spiritual evolution. Bodies, plants, flowers and halos connect within an inner space where art becomes a realm of consciousness and vital force.
Yet recognition from the art world and the market gives rise to a new danger: that of replacing the spontaneity of creation with the already established image of the artist. A near-death experience in 2002 led her to profoundly reconsider life, death and existence. She gradually withdrew from the Parisian art world, not in order to abandon art, but to preserve her creative freedom.
3. Towards Awakening: When Painting Becomes a Channel for Consciousness
In the 2000s, Li Shuang left Paris and withdrew to the village of Achères-la-Forêt, on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. She transliterates the name phonetically into Chinese as “Ashe”, resonating with the Chinese character she (舍): to relinquish, to let go. Its pronunciation also evokes the French word jachère — land left fallow. Nature, solitude and silence enabled her to shift the question “Who should I become?” towards a broader inquiry: when the narrative of the “little self” comes to an end, how does life continue to unfold?
The figures she paints gradually become more abstract. The boundaries between body, plants, light and space dissolve. The human being does not disappear, but ceases to be regarded as a closed unit: the body becomes a vessel, a medium, a meeting place for memory, vital forces and consciousness.
Awakening does not mean fleeing reality or eliminating desire and suffering. It means entering a broader space of consciousness, capable of embracing them without setting them against one another. With L’Éclat du Juste Milieu and L’Aube de la fleur cueillie, this spiritual dimension becomes explicit. Yet Li Shuang is no longer seeking to leave reality behind: she returns fully to life. Light and darkness, good and evil, life and death become distinctions produced by human consciousness, incapable of exhausting what life truly is.
Her most recent works of 2026, notably Le baiser du dragon céleste, L’éclat du juste milieu and L’aube de la fleur cueillie, extend this vision. East and West, earth and the underworld, life and death, love, desire and consciousness meet within them. Light no longer emerges from a rejection of darkness, but from passing through it.
Li Shuang now states that she “no longer regards creation as the invention of an image, but as the soul entering a state of connection, in the ecstatic joy of making love with Heaven. When the artist enters this state of connection, the work is no longer something that has been artificially made; it becomes the process through which a reality that already existed gradually reveals itself.”
In such a state of consciousness, the artist is no longer the sole creator of the work. She assumes more fully the role of listener and witness. This conception resonates with the concept of Wu Wei, “non-action”: not giving up on creating, but allowing creation to unfold. She likes to think that “everyone is an artist”. It is not a matter of becoming a professional artist, but of rediscovering the capacity to feel life, to embrace one’s consciousness and reconnect with one’s inner truth. Art manifests itself in the way one lives, confronts fear, moves through relationships and learns to love.
Today, Li Shuang’s works no longer seek to prove an identity. They simultaneously embrace light and shadow, desire and fear, history and silence, life and death. They remain open, unfinished, infinitely receptive.
“I am…” thus remains an open sentence. The “I” is no longer merely the individual constituted by history, society and memory, but a presence capable of resonating with broader dimensions.
Art has never existed to explain life. It is life itself that allows art to immerse itself in it, to breathe with it and to share its destiny.
