Art+ Shanghai Gallery Presents Solo Exhibition by Li Daocheng

"Red as Memory," Li Daocheng's new body of paintings at Art+ Shanghai Gallery, examines memory, corporeality, and perception, turning the canvas into a psychological landscape where lived experience fragments and reshapes pictures.

Human figures, vessels, architectural fragments, botanical forms and animal bodies emerge from vivid fields of earthen reds, burnt umbers, acidic greens and flashes of yellow. Red takes on a central role, evoking flesh, soil, heat and ritual while serving as a metaphor for the accumulated layers of memory.

Li's works blur figure and object, interior and landscape, and presence and recollection. Images emerge through excavation and revision through layered pigments, scratched surfaces, and raw linear marks. Bodies and objects dissolve into crimson and black fields, while other figures appear and disappear.

Although the paintings' intense colors and agitated surfaces recall Neo-Expressionism, the painter directs this visual language toward a contemporary exploration of fragmented perception and the instability of identity. Ultimately, "Red as Memory" presents painting as an archaeology of perception, where images survive not as fixed records but as traces continually transformed by emotion, time and experience.

Li Daocheng from Lijiang, Yunnan Province, is a contemporary Chinese artist whose work explores cultural memory, psychological fragmentation and silence. A graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York, he combines classical Chinese aesthetics with Western postmodern thought and expressive mark-making.

Since returning to China in 2020, he has exhibited at Art+ Shanghai Gallery and Objective Gallery and completed site-specific commissions for Louis Vuitton flagship stores in Beijing and Chengdu.

If you go

Date: Through November 6; 10am-6pm, Tuesday to Saturday; Sundays & Mondays by appointment only

Venue: Art+ Shanghai Gallery

Address: B1-6, Sunken Garden, Lane No.9, Qufu Rd 曲阜路9弄下沉广场B1-6

Admission: Free