lit a candle 1h agonever heard of this man till my wife showed me the article. spent thirty some years working with silkworms, actual live worms, making his art out of what they spun. I raise tomatoes and okra out back and call that a good year if the squash don't get the vine borer, so I don't rightly know what to make of a man giving his whole life over to bugs on purpose. but there was something about it, the patience of it, that got to me. he was 81. guess that's a full run of seasons. edit: looked closer, one piece was just wax candles in bamboo, like a funeral thing. that part I understood.
Their story
Liang Shaoji was a Chinese conceptual artist who spent more than three decades collaborating with living silkworms, turning their silk into meditations on nature, time and human fragility. Born in Shanghai in 1945 and originally from Zhongshan, he studied at the China Academy of Art, later training in textile art…
Liang Shaoji was a Chinese conceptual artist who spent more than three decades collaborating with living silkworms, turning their silk into meditations on nature, time and human fragility. Born in Shanghai in 1945 and originally from Zhongshan, he studied at the China Academy of Art, later training in textile art with Maryn Varbanov. From 1988 he cultivated silkworms himself, making their life cycle the medium of his Nature Series. He died in Shanghai on 13 September 2026, aged 81, after years living between Shanghai and the Tiantai mountains.
His installations wrapped silk over metal, bamboo, mirrors, helmets and stone until art and biology seemed inseparable. Natural Series No. 25 filmed him wounding his feet so the worms' pain while spinning on metal scrap would be met by his own; Candles (No. 87) filled bamboo with wax and silk in a Buddhist funeral image; Cloud (No. 101) used worms on mirrored glass to muse on time; Helmets (No. 102) covered miners' helmets in fine silk as a memorial to suppressed fear and pain. Critics such as Wu Hung and Hou Hanru read the work as philosophy made visible: struggle, transformation and the ethics of living with other creatures.
Liang exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1999), Istanbul (1999), Lyon (2000) and Shanghai (2000, 2006), and later at LACMA, the Hayward Gallery, Power Station of Art and M Woods. He received a Chinese Contemporary Art Award in 2002 and a Prince Claus Award in 2009 for art that made nature and culture exchange places. ShanghART Gallery represented him for decades, staging solos that introduced international audiences to silk as a living process rather than a luxury commodity.
In later years he retreated for long stretches to Tiantai, raising worms and refining installations that resisted easy sale. Late exhibitions included Phantasmagoria at the Shanghai Museum of Glass, Sea of the Cloud in Shenzhen, and Silk Radiance at Liangzhu Museum in 2025. Obituaries in The Paper remembered an artist who spent his last thirty years in retreat with silkworms, still showing internationally. His Nature Series remains a touchstone for ecological and process-based art from China, inviting viewers to watch life spin itself into form.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia; ShanghART Gallery; Prince Claus Fund; The Paper; The World of Chinese.
In their own words
“Some say that the ultimate goal of art is for the artist to express their life experiences and emotions. Then what we see here is the life of a silkworm.”
Wu Hung on Liang's silkworm practice, ShanghART materials
“Evocative artworks that offer a meditative approach in which art becomes nature and nature becomes art.”
Prince Claus Award citation, 2009
Photos
2Liang Shaoji framed by silk from his Nature Series
by People Forever
Liang Shaoji with silkworms and silk works
by People Forever
That mirrored piece stayed with a lot of people, glad your mum shared it with you