Chinese Empresses at Tower Hill
From June to October 2025 the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill showed Xiang Li’s Chinese Empresses in its Milton and Fern Galleries, and 66,385 people came to see them. This page shows that exhibition, and how the same work can be fitted to a garden of any size.
Four months, two galleries
The Garden hung wall-length silk originals and a long run of empress portraits through its Milton and Fern Galleries. Every empress is painted with a flower chosen for her — peony, plum blossom, orchid, lotus — so the work sat naturally among the Garden’s own plantings. The private reception opened with a lion dance in the courtyard.
June 14 – October 12, 2025
- 66,385
- Visitors during the exhibition
- 15,451
- Views of the Garden’s exhibition page
- 165,000
- People reached on the Garden’s social channels
- 4
- Monthly Garden newsletters featuring the show
“Honors the unsung women who shaped dynasties.”
Photographs: Bones Pro Studios Fei’s reflections on the exhibition →
The artist and her producer
Xiang Li 李湘 spent thirty-seven years in the Forbidden City, where magnolias grow throughout the palace grounds. Peonies, plum blossoms and orchids from those imperial gardens run through her empresses, painted on silk in ground mineral pigment, and many of her smaller paintings are flowers outright.
Her daughter, Fei Wu, produces every exhibition — selection, installation, wall text and events — and is the speaker at receptions and talks, translating for her mother. Visitors come to meet Xiang; Fei builds the program around her.
- 37
- Years at the Forbidden City
- 200+
- Empresses, each with her flower
- 4 m
- Longest silk scrolls
Originals, canvas, or both
Gardens differ in size and gallery space. A show can be built from any of these.
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Large silk originals
Silk scrolls up to four meters long and wall-length murals, for galleries that have the wall space and care for them.
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Stretched canvas prints, any size
High-quality canvas prints of the paintings in any size and orientation — portrait or landscape, one panel or a long run — so a show fits a small visitor center or fills a long corridor.
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An opening reception and talk
Fei Wu leads the talk, including what each flower means, and translates for Xiang Li, who is there to meet guests. At Tower Hill the evening opened with a lion dance in the courtyard.
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Her other botanical work
Where it suits the season, the empresses can hang with Xiang’s flower paintings: lotus and plum-blossom fan leaves, Guanyin among lotuses.
The flowers in the paintings
Each empress’s flower echoes her temperament, power or legacy. These are the ones that recur most.
- Peony
- China’s national flower: honor, prosperity, the high rank of an empress.
- Magnolia
- Purity and dignity — abundant in the Forbidden City’s own courtyards.
- Rose
- Grace at court, and the love and tenderness many empresses lived without.
- Winter plum
- Blooming in snow: resilience through the hardships of palace life.
- Orchid
- The scholar’s flower: moral integrity and quiet refinement.
- Lotus
- Rising clean from mud — the flower beneath Guanyin.
Her other botanical work
Smaller flower paintings that can join a garden show if they suit it.
Venues that have hosted the work
- Thomas Crane Public Library · May 22, 2027
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston · February 7, 2027
- Worcester Art Museum · January 31, 2027
- Newton Free Library
- Wellesley Free Library
- Jean McDonough Arts Center (JMAC)
- Creative Hub Worcester
- LabCentral
- Tatnuck Bookseller
- Gutman Library, Harvard Graduate School of Education
- Happy Lamb Hot Pot, Boston Chinatown
- New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill
- Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)
- Mary Cosgrove Dolphin Gallery, Worcester State University
- UMass Memorial Health
- College of the Holy Cross
- Denholm Building
- Cambridge Public Library
- Kathryn Schultz Gallery, Cambridge Art Association
- Blackstone Valley Art Association
- ValleyCAST
- Harvard Museums
Questions
For the Garden’s full impact figures, gallery plans, print sizes, dates or images, write to the studio. Fei Wu produces and presents the studio’s programs and will answer.
Contact the studio Fei Wu · Producer and speaker · Xiang Li’s daughter
xiangliart@gmail.com