Li Ran: Like a Stranger

For his first solo exhibition with Lisson Gallery in Shanghai, Li Ran presents a series of new and recent works that highlight the evolving direction of his painting practice, marked by a deepened focus on material painterliness and pictorial storytelling. Influenced by pre-modernist traditions, including Western European Symbolism, Post-Impressionism, Soviet Revolutionary Romanticism, and modern Chinese satirical cartoons, Li draws inspiration not only from the visual heritage of these movements but also from the multidisciplinary activities of their practitioners, spanning literature, poetry, music, education, publishing, and painting. His own practice is similarly interdisciplinary, extending across installation, performance, writing, video, and painting, and often incorporating archival photographs, staged imagery, vocal imitation, and sound performance.

In this exhibition, Li avoids both the conceptualist reduction of painting to mere image-bearing substrate as well as the framing of ‘painterliness’ as a privileged domain of aesthetics. Instead, he distills interwoven dimensions from a holistic view of his broader artistic output, thereby opening a more expansive field of possibility within his approach to painting—one that neither leans toward an ineffable future fantasy nor settles for facile recombination of his own prior imagery. Collectively, the works engage in a sustained dialogue around the notion of the ‘stranger.’ This figure, whom the artist seeks through his practice, may be discovered externally or ultimately recognized as the artist himself; it may also be that the stranger was present all along. Whether in states of waiting, walking, or performing, the ‘stranger’ persists. The failure to recognize this presence stems not from unfamiliarity, but from an underlying incapacity to trust. For Li, the lens of estrangement thus operates as a mechanism for sustaining self-awareness and critical self-reflection amid his day-to-day routines.

Resisting confinement to a fixed visual language or a dogmatic ontology of painting, Li engages the medium with enduring regard for its inherent demands. Within the pictorial field, he constructs a space of dialogue that feels both intimate and remote. Through tensions between repetition and variation, he suggests that painting itself constitutes a continual encounter with the “stranger”—an encounter that becomes internalised as a driving force for his evolving practice. In these works, Li moves beyond the mere depiction of solitude; he actively adopts defamiliarization as a stance, one that allows him to maintain self-reflexivity while approaching glimpses of truth with conviction. This ever-present “stranger” may, in the end, be the very source from which Li Ran learns repeatedly how to reflect and restart.