Li Shun is a young artist with comprehensive artistic taste and presentation skills. What is more valuable is his effective exploration of the modernization evolution of traditional Chinese art. Li Shun gets his aspiration from photography, in which light is the predominant protagonist. The switch between positive and negative images is the logic origin of his works. He started his creation in 2010, and his keenness on traditional film photography shaped his original description grammar, which gave rise to a series of concept photography works like Study the Nature of Things. The motion trail of light leaves abstract dots, lines and surface on the film. His basic working manner is to do field studies to collect enormous lights in cities that are caught by camera at night, and compose a masterpiece of Chinese calligraphy with the strokes and dots on the film. Li Shun’s achievement is not limited to abstract art. In 2014 he created Anonymous series. He first drew negative images of portraits, and recovered the images on the photographic paper with film photography. Li Shun’s latest works focus on image-based discussions of the pure nature of things. In his White Paper series of 2015, he first shot a piece of paper, and then printed the image on this piece of paper. The overlapping image and things show his efforts to question emptiness and existence, as well as his purer and deeper thoughts on concept art.

Written by Li Xu in Yugucun of Shanghai, August 2016