Xiang Li’s paintings have hung for a semester in a Harvard library, filled a performing arts center at Holy Cross and joined three shows at Worcester State University’s gallery. This page is for campus galleries, museums, libraries, performing arts centers and student groups: the work, how it has been shown on campus, and the talks Fei Wu gives with it.
Xiang Li 李湘 spent thirty-seven years in the Palace Museum’s copying and restoration studio in Beijing, and since 2010 has painted China’s empresses on raw silk in mineral pigment — more than two hundred women, dynasty by dynasty. The work opens onto many subjects a campus teaches: history, women’s leadership, materials and technique, and moving between cultures.
Her daughter, Fei Wu, produces every campus program and is the speaker — lectures, gallery talks and panels — translating for her mother, who is there to meet students in person.
The empresses for history and women’s studies, the book for the library, and portraits of living people for anyone curious how a portrait can say who someone is.
中国皇后
Over two hundred women of Chinese history on silk — originals, or stretched canvas prints for spaces that are not guarded.
画册
Chinese Empresses, a full-color hardcover by Xiang Li and Fei Wu — for the library, a course shelf or the gallery’s reading table.
肖像
Living people painted on silk, surrounded by the flowers and birds that say who they are.
A library, a performing arts center and a university gallery, each used in its own way.
For the fall semester, Xiang Li’s empress portraits on silk hung around the walls of Gutman Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where students and faculty study, meet and pass through every day. The show asked viewers to think about the wisdom, resilience and leadership of women across Chinese history.
September 3 – November 30, 2025
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ASIA (Advocating Student Interests in Asia), a student organization, invited us to a showcase of Asian and Asian American artists from across New England. More than two dozen large empress canvases hung through the performing arts center, and Fei Wu gave a fifteen-minute talk, “Art Is Love”, on her mother’s path from the Forbidden City to beginning the empresses at sixty. In the Q&A, students asked what inspired the empresses and about the cold palace where neglected empresses were sent.
November 2024 Read the story →
Xiang Li’s silk paintings have joined three exhibitions in the university’s gallery: Fire and Water and Flora and Fauna in fall 2024, and Transparency in early 2025. At the Flora and Fauna reception, her silk portrait of Tripti Gore Chandorkar, a longtime member of the Xiang Li Art team, hung on the gallery wall.
2024 – 2025 Read the story →
Most campus programs pair a show with a talk.
Fei Wu speaks to a class, a department or a student group — on the paintings, on Chinese history and the women in it, or on how an artist’s studio works today — translating for Xiang Li, who is there to meet students.
Originals or canvas prints for a semester in a campus gallery, library or common room, as at Gutman Library. For spaces without a guard, we recommend the canvas prints.
Large canvases along lobbies and corridors for a festival or showcase, as at the Prior Performing Arts Center.
Student organizations have invited us to cultural showcases. We bring the work and shape the program with the students who are running it.
Venues that have hosted the work
For semester dates, hanging requirements, a talk for a class or student group, 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