Don Gallery is pleased to announce artist LI Shan's solo exhibition, Landscape Diaries: LI Shan × No Name Group, will be presented at Grisebach Switzerland, Zurich, Switzerland. The exhibition opens on October 1, 2025, and runs until November 14, 2025.
No Name Group: Avant-Garde Aspirations within Landscape
As the first non-official artists’ collective in the history of Chinese contemporary art, the No Name (Wuming) Group emerged well before the Stars Art Group, with its activities spanning from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. Particularly in the 1970s—a period when China’s economy was under severe constraint, cultural life was highly regulated, and art was reduced to an instrument of collective discourse—a group of young artists chose to gather discreetly on weekends and holidays to paint landscapes together. They neither echoed official rhetoric nor submitted to dominant artistic conventions; instead, they upheld the ideal of “art for art’s sake,” preserving the classical values of truth, goodness, and beauty. At its core, their practice was both an act of resistance against prevailing vulgarizations of art and a latent articulation of modernity beneath the surface of public culture.
The primary focus of the No Name Group was landscapes and plein-air painting, but these were not exercises for technical training, nor simple objects of depiction. Rather, their landscapes functioned as sites of practice that bore the weight of both history and lived reality. Locations such as the Ming Tombs, Xiangshan (Fragrant Hills), and Yuyuantan in Beijing were not incidental backdrops but vital “spiritual terrains” for artistic activity. These landscapes were deeply intertwined with the artists’ life experiences and social conditions, bearing witness to historical upheavals and institutional shadows. Art historian GAO Minglu once compared the No Name Group to French Impressionism: neither was engaged in simple sketching, but in articulating a broader “spectacle” of their times. The difference, however, is telling—while the Impressionists depicted an industrialized, urban Paris teeming with modern crowds, the No Name Group artists worked within the Beijing of the 1970s, a city not yet transformed by commercial society or metropolitan life. Their landscapes, therefore, are often desolate and silent, with few figures—when they do appear, it is usually the artists themselves or anonymous passersby.
Just as the Impressionists first inscribed modern Paris onto canvas, the No Name Group created an unprecedented “Beijing landscape” of their time. Their works recorded not only the physical topography but also the shifting social realities and historical imprints. With China’s modernization, those once utopian landscapes have since been transformed into objects of nostalgia for today’s urban dwellers.
LI Shan’s Diary: The Adventurer’s Passage
Members of the No Name Group are often characterized as an avant-garde collective rejecting both political clichés and material fashion, yet their practices were highly individual rather than stylistically uniform. LI Shan joined the group at the age of fourteen, becoming its youngest member and one of the few who remain active in art-making today. While most of the group lacked formal academic training, LI Shan carried even fewer technical or institutional burdens. Her work is marked by a natural, unembellished directness. She employed flat washes to construct forms, avoiding intricate detail, resulting in images of striking simplicity. The use of small-scale canvases reflected not only limited material resources but also a deliberate stance shaped by her social environment—an implicit departure from orthodox realism and an exploration toward modernist expression.
By the late 1970s, with China’s social atmosphere shifting dramatically, many members of the group gradually withdrew from art, pursuing careers in commerce or other fields. LI Shan was no exception. It was not until 2005, at the age of 48, that she returned to painting. She found that her former skills and sensibilities had never disappeared but had become embedded in her body as a form of enduring memory. Re-engaging with art, LI Shan now painted with the independence and freedom of an individual creator, beyond the collective framework of her youth.
LI Shan’s artistic practice is deeply intertwined with her life experience. An avid traveler, hiker, and snowboarder, she has journeyed through Xinjiang, Scotland, Europe, and South Africa. These travels reshaped her ways of seeing and turned painting into a kind of “diary” of her encounters. She notes that the calm concentration of painting stands in stark contrast to her otherwise outgoing and adventurous character. Whether in floral still lifes, lotus ponds beneath willows, or distant foreign landscapes, her works invite viewers into a world purified of anxiety and agitation. Through her brush, she records and shares her attention to beauty and her passion for life, translating them into images imbued with clarity, warmth, and stability.
