LI SHURUI

The exhibition takes inspiration from a verse by the Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Jiuling: ‘Tall bamboos steeped in the serenity of morning light, the splendid pond cradles sky’s mirrored blue.’ The title of the exhibition, ‘Something Comes from Nothing’ is adapted from the word bixu in the original poem. Referring to the reflection of sky in water, the word literally translates to ‘azure void,’ which forms the philosophical core of the show. In this new body of paintings, Li explores water as a ‘divine presence,’ extending into meditations on life, energy, and the nature of reality and illusion. A crystalised expression of Li’s artistic development following her relocation to the Erhai Lake region, the exhibition marks a new direction in her practice, as she moves beyond the conceptual threads of ‘light’ and ‘abstraction’ and toward a multidimensional perception of the world.

Three years ago, Li moved her home and studio to the shores of Erhai Lake in Dali. This vast body of water has since seeped into her practice as a central motif. The titular work of the show, Something Comes from Nothing, portrays a shimmering expanse of green water on a 1.8-meter-wide square canvas. Through an interplay of form and void, her brushwork portrays the complex emotional connection the artist has with water—both a physical matter and a vessel for transcendental energy. Li refuses to simply ‘feminise’ water: ‘The primordial power of water transcends gender and civilisation; Ta is divine.’ Here, the artist uses the Chinese character ‘祂’ (Ta), which is traditionally adopted as a pronoun for deities, to refer to water. The deliberate choice of word subverts conventional symbolism and expresses reverence for the power of nature.

The works in the exhibition emerged from the artist’s embodied experience of motherhood, as her own bodily rhythm found unexpected echoes with the tidal cycles of Erhai Lake. Collectively, the ‘white streams’ flown during breastfeeding, the overwhelming tears of pregnancy, and the shimmering light reflected on the surface of Erhai sound ‘a resonance between the internal and external water systems, bodily fluid and natural hydrology.’ As the artist candidly expresses, this experience has forced her to look at water at ‘a reclined vantage.’ As she negotiates between the fragility of body and the permanence of nature, new understandings of life’s coalescence and dissipation arise.

In both Eastern and Western traditions of paintings, water has often served as a contrast or backdrop to other subjects. Li attempts to step out of this framework and capture the ‘kinetic energy’ and ‘unruly nature’ of water as a subject in its own right. For example, in Mommy Be Brave (2025), flecks of light visualise the vibration of energy on a taut string, piercing through water vapour to become iridescent clouds ascending, before condensing into raindrops that return to earth—an endless cycle.

Although often deemed an abstract painter, Li questions the dichotomy between abstraction and representation. The exhibition’s conceptual substrate stems from Li’s cross-disciplinary exploration of physics and Buddhist philosophy. String theory’s discovery that particles are essentially vibrations finds unexpected cross-pollination with the teaching of Heart Sutra—that ‘all five aggregates are empty’: if all matter is fundamentally energy in oscillation, then ‘the boundary between abstract and figurative is but a human-imposed confinement.’ This understanding has directly informed Li’s methodology. If her early work Deep White (2017) represents the order of reason by simulating light through dot matrices, Night Surge (2025) blends a ‘lightness out of control’ into the intermingling fields of colour. In this new work, dots and lines remain the signature of Li’s compositional vocabulary. Viewed from a distance, misty water breaks free from gravity and rises toward the sky as stars, while a closer inspection shows cascading liquids dancing with light. Such “order within disorder” serves both as the artist’s response to the current condition of her own life as well as a meditation on existence itself: ‘We are all vibrations in the void, condensing into ‘self’ before dissolving into emptiness.’