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.
Read moreIn 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.
Becoming Wild (2025) draws upon a legend from Li’s childhood. In the 1990s, a man from another town reportedly encountered a ‘wild man’ in the Shennongjia forests of Hubei Province. After the encounter, he chose to remain in the wilderness, living a primitive existence—never cutting his hair, enduring the seasons—while continuing to search for the ‘wild man’. In time, he himself came to be mistaken for the subject he sought. But Your Senses Have Also Fallen (2025) depicts three elongated, distorted figures pulling at one another, some tilting forward or backward, others slipping from a bed, as if verging on collapse. The compositional drama conveys not only turbulence but also a question born of the artist’s self-reflection: Could the very painterliness constructed through sensory experience also become a form of familiar illusion? Oscillating between estrangement and sensuous pleasure, the work extends Li Ran’s ongoing inquiry into his identity as a painter and the self-belief that identity entails.
In Fellow Traveler (2026), Li responds to the exhibition’s title Like a Stranger from a distinct vantage point. Two figures draped in cloaks stride heavily through a hazy space, appearing almost as shadows of one another. One tilts their face downward, their expression evasive, while the other is nearly engulfed in shadow, their features obscured. It is within this fleeting moment of ‘seeing and vanishing’ that Li seeks to capture the uncanny. In the interplay between recognition and loss, the ‘stranger’ emerges not as an unrecognizable other, but as a fellow traveler, who has long accompanied the journey, yet has never been fully acknowledged.
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.
