LiuBei

Liu Bei became Ruxianguli’s first disciple in 2006. She had only just pushed open the door to magic; in her own words, she was ‘full of love, but also full of confusion’. Her master kept her close: drilling the fundamentals over and over in the training hall, watching from the wings how the master held a room; later she put her on the resident stage at Happy Valley Shenzhen, show after show, slowly turning a beginner into a professional performer.

Three years later she took the stage with her own original act, Xiuse. In traditional costume of a distinctly Eastern flavour, she joined classical beauty with the art of magic; brightly coloured cards and exquisite round fans shifted and changed in her hands, and the reticent mystery of the East met the fantastical invention of the modern in a single act — every movement, every transformation of a prop, like the telling of a mysterious story. The act became her calling card: from competitions in Shenzhen to the international circuit in Hong Kong, and in 2013 it became the first magic act ever to win the Guangdong Lu Xun Literature and Art Award.

With her devotion to magic and a finely honed technique she has appeared on stages including CCTV-3; in recent years her name has begun to appear among the guests and organisers of international exchanges, in Hainan, in Thailand, in China–ASEAN events. Her work carries high technical skill, and more than that, the substance of Eastern culture. Twenty years on, she still calls her master ‘master’. In her letter to her, what she wrote down was not the awards, but what she had learned along the way about being a person and being an artist.

‘You taught me not only the craft of magic, but how to be a person, how to be an artist, and how to face the stage, the audience and society with the sense of responsibility of a true worker in the arts.’— Liu Bei, letter of thanks to her master