Author: LI SHURUI 李姝睿

Size: 180×240cm

Signed and dated: Painted in 2012

Estimate:

Final Price: RMB 120,000

Standing in front of the “Lights” series – large-scale airbrushed canvases devoid of obvious content – the viewer must overcome her visual confusion and leverage their own personal knowledge and experience to reach a more imaginative understanding of the work. Herein lies an aesthetic question – aside from immediate visual experience，what else can the viewer take away? “Lights” has in fact gone through a number of changes over the past decade. In the earliest works，the greater part of the canvas is a representation of LED lights photographed by the artist，and in the picture plane the outline of a human figure can be detected. Psychedelic and flickering，these hints of narrative point have a clear meaning：the poetic expression of urban culture. Very soon，Li Shurui further reduced the realistic element to a few geometric points of light. Her paintings of this period may be closest to the Op art everyone is familiar with，yet Li’s dots of light are more emotional，transmitting the visual pulse of the city into their surroundings – not an effect that can be achieved by the deliberate precision of Op art.