In his Morning Exercise in New York series, Li Jin documents his morning excursions during his month-long stay in New York in the Fall of 2019. In number IV of the series, Li Jin combines traditional portraiture with his art school training in Socialist Realism to sketch a young woman standing perhaps at a cross-walk. As he frequently does in his figure painting, Li Jin includes himself in the composition turning this into a self-portrait with an anonymous stranger. As with many of Li Jin’s morning exercises, his subject is observed from a distance, here from behind. The artist must thus tell the story of this young woman—and by extension his own story—using nothing more than body posture.