From a wind-tugged performance to a triptych that rebuilds oil paint into something meant to be dismantled, Lucia Shuyu Li’s work refuses fixed categories—treating conventional forms, institutions, and even perception as materials she can reshape.
For Lucia Shuyu Li, the point isn’t to perfect a single medium. It’s to stress it—until the cracks show.
Her artistic impulse originates from within and finds its way into many applications. moving freely between installation. performance. painting. and sound. She is not defined by the form her art takes, but by the sentiment and ideas behind it. That restlessness has carried her work across galleries, museums, and universities, and now into a new book called Ephemeral Metamorphosis.
What draws her in is the complexity of contemporary society. She delves into the abstract and surreal dimensions of existence. undertakes sociological inquiries. and tries to unravel the nuances of spatial form. She also makes no secret of her refusal to behave like “conventional painting” is the end of the conversation.
“I am unwavering in my commitment to challenging the confines of conventional painting,” Lucia states, “and I do this by embracing a diverse range of multimedia and unconventional formats.”
Born in China in 2001 and based in the US for years. she keeps those boundaries—Chinese heritage and American art career. cultural identities. perception and reality—close enough to touch. and far enough to question. She received a masters of fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has exhibited across the US as well as internationally.
She also brings her research-driven approach into the classroom. Lucia works as an educator at Montgomery College in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she teaches students drawing and ceramics.
“My academic studies allowed me to develop a research-driven methodology that integrates philosophy, psychology, and multi-media based work,” says Lucia. She credits the academic environment at MICA with significantly shaping her understanding of contemporary art discourse. She says it also expanded her approach to interdisciplinary experimentation.
The support has come from multiple corners. Working between performance. installation. and conceptual research. she has received support from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Abell Foundation. while continuing to build an interdisciplinary practice across institutional and experimental art spaces in the United States.
In Washington, DC, the Chinese American Museum has taken note of her innovative work, and her work was included in the Soaring for Peace exhibition this year.
Her most meaningful projects circle back to the body—what it carries, what it can’t control, and what institutions try to fix.
The first is called FAR GONE but so Close. a performance artwork exploring the relationship between the body. identity. and the mind. Naked and facing three fans, Lucia uses a light cloth to cover her face and body. The cloth symbolizes her personal identity. and the force of wind constantly lifts and pushes it away—an image of pressures that refuse to be negotiated when they arrive from the environment and society.
She documented this performance and later transformed it into FAR GONE but so Close. In the installation, the originally soft cloth is reconstructed into the shape it formed while being blown by the wind. Four cameras continuously photograph the cloth.
At first, viewers assume the cameras are recording the present moment. On closer inspection, they discover that the cloth—though physically still—appears to flutter on the screens. “My own image also reappears within the installation space,” says Lucia. “This shift between reality and illusion creates a surreal atmosphere that disrupts the temporal and spatial boundaries of live performance.”.
The same refusal to accept “fixed reality” runs through her other major work, Painting Sickness.
Developed out of her work with oil painting. it began after critiques told her her technical skills were strong. but her paintings appeared flat. Lucia turned that perceived weakness into a strength. creating a triptych installation that evolves step by step from stretcher bars to a completed painting.
In Painting Sickness, the canvases imitate the realistic appearance of the back of a canvas—an often-overlooked detail many viewers only notice after closer observation. Lucia also cuts previous paintings into strips and layers them onto the three-canvas structure.
“I also cut previous paintings into strips and layered them onto the three-canvas structure,” says Lucia. “This combination of traditional painting and conceptual installation reflects an important direction in my practice.”
But for her, the work isn’t only a visual trick. Painting Sickness was born out of frustration with traditional oil painting. She found discussions around it exhausting and wondered if, in the age of digital media, it had become an obsolete art form.
By cutting her paintings into strips, Lucia created a new format—and changed audience attention. Audiences became interested in the original painting before it was sliced up for the exhibition.
There are distant parallels to William S. Burroughs’ cut-up method from Naked Lunch, and Lucia acknowledges the difference between destroying and designing.
“Before creating the installation, I had never intended to destroy the painting,” remarks Lucia. “This led me to reflect on the difference between cutting apart an existing artwork and intentionally creating a painting designed to be dismantled from the beginning.”
She wants to keep moving in that direction: deeper, more immersive, more embodied.
When asked about what she would like to do next. Lucia sees more collaborations with institutions. museum projects. and international research-based exhibitions. But more isn’t the only key word here. She wants to go deeper by creating more immersive performative environments that combine sound, installation, and embodied action.
Such environments, she says, could allow her to explore contemporary psychological and social conditions while also providing viewers with their own illuminating experiences.
She plans to keep building cross-cultural and multidisciplinary collaborations, especially those working in experimental performance, sound art, and conceptual research.
“For me, performance art functions as a method of research rather than purely representation,” says Lucia.
“My work explores the tension between internal psychological states and external institutional systems, often using repetition, sound, spatial disruption, and physical endurance as performative strategies,” she says.
Lucia says she intends, above all, to stay true to her artistic vision and plans to keep exploring the intersection of memory, perception, power, and vulnerability through the fulcrum of the body.
Lucia Shuyu Li MISRYOUM Culture News Ephemeral Metamorphosis FAR GONE but so Close Painting Sickness performance art installation art oil painting sound art Chinese American Museum Soaring for Peace Maryland Institute College of Art Montgomery College Abell Foundation Maryland State Arts Council