Some of the studio’s most-seen work has been in places that are not galleries: a hot pot restaurant, a café, a bookstore, a biotech lab, a city utility box. This page describes those projects and how they were set up. Window displays have a page of their own.
Xiang Li 李湘 painted in the Forbidden City for thirty-seven years and has also taken on very public commissions: between 2013 and 2014 she made more than two hundred paintings for a single office floor in Shenzhen, hallways to boardroom. In Massachusetts she has painted a storefront, a storm drain and a run of café and bookstore walls.
Her daughter, Fei Wu, plans and produces each project with the business — installation, timing and events — and does the talking at them, translating for her mother.
Three collections that have suited public, everyday spaces.
The art became part of an ordinary visit — a meal, a coffee, a walk past a window.
Photograph © 2025 Mel Taing
For Experience Chinatown 2025, Pao Arts Center commissioned eight murals on the theme “Imagine a Greener Future for Chinatown”. Ours ran across the windows of Happy Lamb Hot Pot at 693 Washington Street: pandas and color facing the street for seven weeks.
August 30 – October 17, 2025
Read the story →
A café full of families on a rainy day in AAPI Heritage Month: our prints and panda cards among local Asian artists and small businesses.
May 2025 Read the story →
Hung across several floors of a working lab in Kendall Square, in a gallery program for women artists and artists of color — art met in hallways between experiments.
January – March 2026 Read the story →
Stretched canvases in an independent bookstore and café, beside the book, notecards, coloring books and scarves — so a visitor can take a piece home.
October 2025 Read the story →
One of 37 utility boxes the city turned into public art, led by its Cultural Development Office and the Worcester Cultural Coalition. Ours carries Northern Song empresses, dragons and peacocks at Chandler and Irving Streets.
2025 Read the story →
A painted storm drain: a panda mother and two cubs before a green-and-blue globe, with the words “drains to Curtis Pond”. Public art that also teaches what flows into the water.
Spring 2025 Read the story →
Most projects combined a display with one event.
Canvases on a café, bookstore or office wall, rotated every few months or left for a season.
An art market, a concert pairing or a book signing. Fei Wu leads the conversation and translates for Xiang Li, who meets the guests.
Cards, prints, scarves and the book, where a venue wants to offer them.
Venues that have hosted the work
For mural sizing, installation in a working space, timing around your opening hours, 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
