Early in her career, Li Shan was a prominent member of the No Name Art Group, an avant-garde art collective, working in China in the 1970s. As China faced severe socio-economic strife and the suppression of many forms of culture, the No Name Art Group emerged as the first art collective in Chinese contemporary art. A self-taught artist, Li Shan's practice is focused on everyday scenes, often revisiting subjects of courtyards, pagodas, city streets, country roads, and architecture.
Li Shan is a passionate traveller and avid snowboarder. Based in Beijing, she has recently spent time in Norway, Scotland, and Canada, poetically combining many different artistic influences with freedom and intuition. The charm with which she depicts her idyllic landscapes allows viewers to imagine the artist directly in front of her subjects, bringing an immediacy to her work echoed by the use of oil sticks which allow us to trace the movements of her hand on paper.
Li Shan was born in Beijing in 1957. Shan's work has been exhibited in galleries internationally, with pieces in the permanent collections of the Guangdong Museum of Art, the Hong Kong M+ Museum of Visual Culture, and the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art.