The Beijing-based Li creates pastel works on paper that depict scenes from Soviet-era China. His cinematic, nostalgic gaze looks on a bygone China, revealing not only the historical and political fissures that have opened in the last fifty years, but also timeless emotional resonances in human faces and their relating to one another. These resonances are present in the space the people inhabit. In some of these industrial landscapes, otherwise devoid of the human form as such, one finds factories rendered softly, the smoke from their stacks gently in the air.

Li’s view of the Chinese social and physical landscape is all-encompassing, including pastoral scenes replete with folk gatherings, museum interiors, noirish cityscapes, and views into train cars. In them China is seen in many seasons, both temporal and emotional, and together the works point toward a diffuse narrative whose protagonists are individuals, landscapes, structures and the passage of time through a society.

Li Yousong was born in 1970, studied in the Mural Painting Department at the Chinese Central Academy of Fine Arts, and has shown extensively in China.