| The
Light of Li Shuang
By Michel Nuridsany People
often say to Li Shuang that her paintings are always kind of the same. She'll
be hearing it for some time to come.
It's a question of perception rather
than vocabulary.
It's also simply a question of looking closely.
People
have always said the same thing - and still do - about Daniel Buren's art, mistaking
the tool (Buren's stripes) for how that tool is used (everything else). Yes, his
stripes are always the same; but no, how they are used - different colours, different
media, constantly renewed contexts - is never the same. And, if I may say so,
no artist is more fertile, diverse, or varied than Daniel Buren.
It may seem
surprising to discuss Buren in relation to Li Shuang, whose art could hardly be
more different. Yes, but the best way to undermine such claims is to take an extreme
example, denouncing absurdity with an absurd example.
So is Li Shuang's painting
always kind of the same? First of all, let's lose the wishy-washy "kind of".
Either it's the same or it isn't. If it's "kind of" the same, you have
to be prepared to say what's the same and what isn't. Get an idea of what your
non-committal "kind of" actually means.
That's enough hair-splitting!
We
have here something more serious and subtle, more vital and profound - a style,
an artistic universe.
The faces painted by Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli,
Bellini, can all be said to be "the same", as, indeed, are medieval
or Byzantine portraits or the beautiful women with butterfly-shaped eyebrows in
Chinese paintings of the Tang dynasty or the portraits by Zeng Jing from the Ming
dynasty - portraits of utter clarity and limpidity, all drawn with a fine line
of breathtaking purity. And yet Zeng Jing was famed for his outstandingly life-like
portraits.
Characterisation is a child of the realist era. In earlier times,
distinctive characteristics were less important than the artist's ability to produce
an idealised concentration of the sitter's features that went beyond the play
of facial expressions. See how the artist looks beyond the fleeting moment to
capture a deeper truth and essence. I like to describe the result as a kind of
concentrated abstraction at play within a figurative portrait.
This is what
people who do not take the time to look properly miss. Clearly, since Li Shuang
arrived in France in 1983, she has always depersonalised her portraits.
I
was fortunate enough to visit her split-level basement studio in the south of
Paris, on a short, quiet avenue alongside a graveyard, where I saw some of her
older portraits as well as more recent works. The earlier portraits were more
characterised and identifiable. They represented individuals. Today, her portraits
have been stripped of all identifying features, giving them not only a greater
universality, but also a sort of formal neutrality which opens up another field
altogether - that of spirituality. This makes the works easier to approach.
All
Li Shuang's women have small, well-shaped mouths, long noses, pretty slanting
eyes, and oval faces. All have an inward gaze.
"I may be the only Chinese
woman to paint portraits with a spiritual dimension", Li Shuang told me.
"China must defend its culture and its dignity".
She feels she has
a mission to uphold and defend her work as the heir to the art of centuries past.
This might appear odd to those who know of Li Shuang as a highly talented
artist who was a founder member of one of the legendary avant-garde movements
in Chinese art in the late 1970s. The Stars, founded in 1979, was the first modern
group of the post-Cultural Revolution era, when Impressionism was the most modern
item on the syllabus, in an inquisitorial and repressive system that was totally
unprepared for the wind of change and freedom represented by these young artists.
"We were soldiers for art", she says.
The clampdown was not
long in coming. The group was targeted. Li Shuang was imprisoned for two years
for having a relationship with a French diplomat. She left prison in 1983 for
exile in France with the diplomat, now her husband.
This magnificent story
of love and courage was the focus of much attention at the time.
On arriving
in France, Li Shuang was in for a shock. Modern art was nothing like she thought.
The fashion was for post-modernism and bad painting. It was a steep learning curve.
Fortunately, Li Shuang knows her own mind. And, she says, she's "a slow
worker". In any case, she was in no hurry.
"I devoured museums",
she says. "I didn't just follow whatever everyone else loved. I looked without
really looking. What was important was knowing whether what I was looking at was
sincere or not".
She was puzzled by what she saw, but not destabilised.
Yes, she tried out all sorts of new directions, but she was also aware that she
had to look inwards, not lose focus, not lose herself in things that did not concern
her, her own story, or her own inner self.
She made lovely, elegant collages
on monochrome backgrounds. Works of some merit.
She painted, six or seven hours
a day.
Sometimes working on two paintings at once.
Until she found the idea
that she developed day after day, year after year - a waist-length portrait of
a young woman, shown face on or in slight profile, against a backdrop of trees,
bamboo, or, in her most recent works, flowers.
The flowers denote an offering
or celebration. They rise up towards the sky, forming bouquets or haloes around
the face, arranged in rows of delicate pink, straw yellow, lavender blue, bold
orange, or flame red. The backgrounds are in warm, luminous tones. The faces are
in smooth, matte paint, the flowers in quick, dashing strokes with touches like
bright, flashing commas, the background dusted with paint or with a halo effect.
"It's
so lovely to compare women to flowers", as Paul-Jean Toulet said. Yes. But
this is not what Li Shuang does. She juxtaposes them, creates a relationship between
them, integrates them. And, true to her Asian roots, she uses nature to create
an atmosphere of irresistible serenity.
It should be noted that while her family
has been Christian for generations, Li Shuang herself feels as close to Buddhism
as she does to Christianity. The spiritual dimension of these immobile yet radiant
paintings is thus due not so much to a given religion as to a transcendent sense
of spirituality which suffuses all faiths if one explores deep enough.
While
the Chinese art world is going through a phase of unrestrained modernity, Li Shuang's
oeuvre is striking for its lack both of contemporary references and of all sense
of febrile haste or intensity.
This is because her art developed separately
from the Chinese context, which encouraged a style of painting which reached its
apogee in 1999-2000 - a style which in no way reflected her own experiences. Her
strongest advantage has been her silence.
Her aura.
But first and foremost,
her admirable sense of light. Michel
Nuridsany
Translated by Susan Pickford Michel
Nuridsany is a critic of both art and literature. He is also a freelance exhibition
curator, film director, and scriptwriter, and has written a number of books on
art, including China Art Now, published by Flammarion in French and English.
Among
his many achievements, Michel Nuridsany was artistic director for the Arles festival
of photography in 1995 and curator of the French pavilion at the S?o Paulo biennial
in 1985 and at the Cairo and Alexandria biennials in 2001.
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