Li Shun

Li Shun is a Chinese artist whose conceptual practice originates in photography, with light as its central subject and the exchange between positive and negative images as its structural logic. Beginning in 2010, his engagement with traditional film photography produced the series Study the Nature of Things (Ge Wu Zhi Zhi): working at night, he photographs the movement of city lights, collecting the abstract dots, lines, and traces they leave on film, then composes these light-drawn strokes into large-scale works structured like Chinese calligraphy scrolls. In the Anonymous series (begun 2014) he hand-draws negative images of portraits and restores them to positives through film photography, and in the White Paper series (begun 2015) he photographs a sheet of paper and prints the image back onto that same sheet, overlapping image and object to question emptiness and existence. His exhibition Chinglish (Make Room, Los Angeles, 2019) extended this investigation to the internet, using Google Maps as a tool for a contemporary form of landscape study.

Li Shun was born in 1988 in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China, and studied at the China Academy of Art School of Intermedia Art, Hangzhou, receiving his bachelor's degree in 2011 and his master's degree in 2015. Solo exhibitions and projects include Chinglish, Make Room, Los Angeles (2019); Oceanic Scroll, Beijing Art Now Gallery, Beijing (2018); a solo project at Art Basel Hong Kong (2018); New Peach-Blossom Source, The Artone Center, Hangzhou (2015); and Ge Wu Zhi Zhi, Aether Space, Beijing (2012). Group exhibitions include the TOP 20 Chinese Contemporary Photography Exhibition, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou (2017); Post-Brushwork Era: Chinese Landscapes, Guangdong Museum of Art (2018); the 2nd Changjiang International Photography and Video Biennale, Chongqing (2017); and Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, Xiamen (2015).

His awards include the Silver Award of The Civil Power, Beijing Minsheng Art Museum (2015), selection as one of the TOP20 Chinese Cutting-Edge Contemporary Photographers (2017), a nomination for the Sixth Three Shadows Photography Award (2014), and a nomination for the Art 8 Chinese Young Artists Award, Beijing (2019). His work is held in the collections of White Rabbit Gallery, Australia; HOW Art Museum, China; and ZHI Art Museum, China.