At Li Shan's solo exhibition, "Building the Rouge Empire: Paintings from 1976-1992," held in Hong Kong in 1994, the artist showed for the first time a painting from 1988, entitled Surface No. 2. The Shanghai critic Wu Liang commented on the work as follows: "In another of his grid paintings, [Li Shan] has added the gaudy face of a woman, and equally gaudy lotus blossoms. Later, in another two more paintings entitled Surface No. 2, the thick rouge on the gaudy woman's face and the earlier images of lotus blossoms reappeared unexpectedly, as if the genes of his later Rouge Empire series were lurking therein."1 As Wu Liang suggested, from the time the gaudy female figure and lotus blossoms made their i...