Li Rui is a young and promising artist who graduated from the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou and the Universität der Künste in Berlin. She paints characters inside glass using a mirror technique which references the Chinese naiveté realism of miniature within glass paintings. Liu Rui starts by applying the last layer of painting on the glass and finishes with the background, a backward technique that challenges the traditional portrait  approach with freshness and sharpness. On both sides the painting seems to drip, to dilute within its round frame leaving human beings unveiled in their rebellion. Li Rui, with her young spirit, takes a social anthropological approach by pulling the “masks” off people, revealing what lurks behind their superficial needs and ideals. Hers is a contemporary method of painting that may be further illustrated by this line of poetry from John Ashbery: "I see only the chaos of your round mirror which organizes everything."

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and ifa gallery