PROVENANCE:
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

“Li Shan is one of the most important artists in the history of Chinese contemporary art. In his four-decade long artistic career, Li Shan has always insisted on constantly contemplating, exploring and reflecting on life and human nature through artistic creation. In the early eighties, Li Shan participated in the promotion of avant-garde art movement and became a representative painter of “rational painting”, Chinese abstract art, in the mid-eighties. At the end of the eighties, Li Shan created Yan Zhi (rouge) series, which led him not only be regarded as the representative of the “political pop” art, his series of work with “pink” symbols was also well known. Since the mid-nineties, Li Shan has begun creation of his bio-art—the Reading series. This exhibition is to present Li Shan’s thinking, ideas, and experiments regarding bio-art over the past 17 years by presenting a part of his works.” (Expert from Taipei MOCA’s press release for the exhibition “Reading Li Shan”)

While Li Shan was attending the Venice Biennial in 1993, he was enlightened by the art of Matthew Barney, a young American artist. After this experience, Li Shan started to paint his Reading series. As for the interpretation of the name Reading, Li Shan said: Constantly people make mistakes in the process of reading, and mistakes sometimes arouse creations, which can be a new explanation, or extraordinary and varied elements. Li Shan's paintings describe a surrealistic world where some peculiar orc-like beings live. Some of them have wings like butterflies, and others are variated species. This imaginary world portrays people with a poetic and erotic atmosphere with a sense of tension and alienation.