Signifiers of Chinese Spiritual Fusion: The Avant-Garde Portraits of Li Shuang

Li Shuang was a founding member of the Chinese avant garde collective, The Stars: a group of socio-politically motivated, experimental artists who aimed to bypass the limitations of social realism through raw, artistic personal expression. She was also their only female member in 1979—and the only one to be imprisoned following a scandalous request to marry a foreigner in 1981. Shuang’s contemporary portraits of colorful, dream-like Buddhist figures seem to explore Chinese spirituality, class and gender presentation through folk-religious practices and the melding of the “Big 3” teachings: Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. In this paper, I posit that Shuang’s contemporary portraiture is integral to understanding the zeitgeist of Reformist China in the 1970s through the lens of a shared Chinese spirituality as a unifying social factor. For this purpose, three of Shuang’s contemporary artworks (Buddha Under a Blossoming Branch, Dancing Flowers, and Waiting for the Arrival of Yong Tong—all from 2006) were formally and visually analyzed for relevant themes. Findings suggest that Shuang incorporated aspects of folk religion within the compositions to convey a unifying, revolutionary “enlightened” character across social strata. Furthermore, an artistic exploration of similar themes across classes seems to allude to a sense of equality reflective of Chinese goals for social union in the 1970s.