Li Shan  (Chinese, 1942) 

Li Shan (Chinese, b.1942) is a painter and prominent figure in the Political Pop movement that developed in China in the 1990s. He is best known for his portraits of Mao Zedong set against a background of blue, pink, or green color and often accompanied by a lotus flower. Born in Heilongjiang Province, Li studied oil painting at the Shanghai Drama Institute before establishing his place on the Shanghai art scene. Beginning in the late 1970s, Li rejected Socialist Realism, a style popular among his contemporaries, and distinguished his own work as self-expressive and politically critical. His most famous series of paintings, entitled Rouge and started in the late 1980s, depicts stylized figures, abstract flowers, and portraits of Mao reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s screenprints of the same subject. Li parodies the leader’s image cultivated through his propaganda posters by presenting him as a frivolous, feminine character. In his recent series Reading from 2005, Li digitally composed images of insects and plants from parts of the human body, alluding to the role of ethics in today’s bio-scientific experiments. Li’s work has been exhibited at the 1993 Venice Biennale, the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, among other institutions. He currently lives and works in Shanghai.