Li Shurui was born in Chongqing, China in 1981, graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2004 and has quickly risen to be one of the most prominent female contemporary artists of the Generation Y. Li has already exhibited in various cities within China and across the globe: held a solo show in the Long March Foundation in Beijing; participated in multiple group exhibitions Shanghai, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guiyang, Miami, Torino, Humlebæk (Denmark), Seoul, Hong Kong and most recently in Today Art Museum in Beijing as well as numerous art fairs such as Scope Miami, Scope Basel in Switzerland, Korea International Art Fair in Seoul, Artissima in Torino and Art Dubai over the past three years.

Very few Chinese female artists of her generation have received as much attention and international exposure as Li Shurui. In 2008, she was highlighted as an emerging Chinese female artist to watch in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune; in 2009 she was named among the top 500 young artists from around the world in a directory titled “Younger than Jesus” by the New Museum in Brooklyn, New York and this year, she has been selected by Phaidon to be featured in their new publication Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting, published this fall.

After her solo show in Connoisseur Contemporary last May, she started a new Lights-related series titled “Polar Lights” which was inspired by a natural phenomenon of aurora borealis in which the artist was able to create on canvas the effect of polar lights so rarely seen in nature. The new exhibition will bring together her work from 2010, most of which were inspired by music sound waves, her “Polar Lights” series as well as a few pieces inspired by a concept named after a Swiss psychologist – Herman Rorschach, who discovered that people looking at the same ‘inkblot’ can see many different things. The “Rorschach Test” became a test to examine personality characteristics and emotional functioning. The artist has borrowed the idea to create large-scale paintings with mirror symmetry and myriad of colours in which one person may see a terrifying monster and the other a beautiful butterfly. Interesting what would Dr Rorschach say about that?