The New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill in Boylston, Massachusetts has been transformed into a space where botanical beauty meets historical majesty. “Chinese Empresses,” the culminating exhibition of Xiang Li’s extraordinary 12-year artistic journey, brings together over 200 hand-painted portraits of Chinese imperial women, each a testament to grace, power and cultural memory. This exhibition, on view through August 24, marks the first time the collection is shown after years of partial showings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Harvard Museums, Worcester Art Museum and beyond. Surrounded by blooming gardens, visitors are invited into a world where history and art unfold across silk with gemstone watercolors.
Xiang Li’s career is as storied as the women she paints. For 37 years, she was a Master Artist at the Forbidden City in Beijing, where she restored and preserved some of China’s most treasured works of art. With “Chinese Empresses,” Li turns from restoration to revelation, bringing to life the often-overlooked lives of imperial women whose influence quietly shaped dynasties.
Inspired by historical research and cultural reverence, Li draws on traditional Chinese painting techniques passed down through generations, incorporating delicate silk surfaces, natural pigments and mineral-infused watercolors. Her years of study, both scholarly and spiritual, result in portraits that are at once formally exquisite and emotionally resonant.
The visual language of the exhibition is rich in symbolism and story. Take, for example, her monumental silk painting, “Northern Song Dynasty Early Period Empresses,” which spans two-by-four meters. This panoramic narrative scroll moves the viewer through realms of divine origin, imperial ascension, dynastic motherhood and harmonious courtly life. Dragons and phoenixes soar among cloud banks; empresses cradle heirs, surrounded by lotus blossoms and peonies; goddesses offer orbs etched with celestial authority. It is a visual and spiritual journey that honors not just the empresses as individuals but the entire cosmic system they inhabited and often guided.