Xiang Li 李湘

Who is Xiang Li

A master artist of the Palace Museum, and one of the few painters alive who learned the imperial copying tradition from the generation that still held it.

Xiang Li 李湘 enlisted in 1969 and entered the Palace Museum — the Forbidden City — in 1974. She arrived with a grounding in both Western and Chinese painting, and was trained by the leading masters of the day into a specialist of the museum's principal copying studio: reproducing and restoring the paintings and calligraphy that were never allowed to leave the room.

Between 1975 and 1985 she painted every character in Dream of the Red Chamber — 413 of them, plus the Land of Illusion. It was the first complete set in Chinese history. China News Service announced it to the world; every television station and newspaper covered it. The collection hung at the Grand View Garden in Beijing for twenty years before the National Studies Museum in Qingdao acquired it and, in 2016, signed an agreement with her to build a Dream of the Red Chamber museum and research center around it.

The sequel, One Hundred Flower Goddesses, was inscribed by the best-known Chinese calligraphers and painters of the twentieth century — Dong Shouping, Fan Zeng, Zhou Ruchang, Zhou Cezong, Shanmao Wu, and Pu Jie, the Last Emperor's brother.

In 2010 she began the hardest thing she has ever attempted: a complete record of China's empresses, dynasty by dynasty. Every painting is made on real silk, in ground mineral pigments she mixes with Japanese and American watercolor — expensive, unforgiving, and, she decided, the only honest way to do it. The Song scrolls run from two to four meters.

In 2016 she donated the entire proceeds of a Zhuhai Red Cross charity sale — USD 140,000 — to children with autism. She came to the United States at sixty as an artist of extraordinary ability, and has since been invited to advise at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.