Linda Li

Linda Li appears in Andy Warhol’s diary as a practitioner he visits repeatedly for physical treatment and advice, and as someone whose methods reach beyond conventional examination into kinesiology and crystal energy. Their encounters give form to Warhol’s persistent attention to illness: he seeks reassurance and practical guidance, but also turns to explanations that make uncertainty feel tangible and testable.

Identity and Practice

Li’s work, as Warhol describes it, combined several modalities. He identifies her as a kinesiology practitioner who massaged pressure points and worked as a nutritionist. He considered her better than Dr. Bernsohn, while noting that the two practitioners did not overlap in their approach. The diary does not provide a professional biography or explain how Warhol first came to see her; instead, it builds her identity through recurring appointments and the details of what she did during them.

Those details make her treatment vivid. During one visit, Li took the objects out of Warhol’s pockets and tested his phone numbers for black magic. She placed his hand on his chest to assess whether energy was present, then held out his arm and tested its resistance. Warhol described lying down with his arm extended, an image that makes the procedure appear at once methodical and strange. The ordinary contents of his pockets—two keys, objects given to him in Japan by John and Kimiko Powers, and phone numbers—became part of an examination that asked whether they carried harmful influence.

Treatment, Advice, and Reassurance

Warhol’s visits were not limited to energy testing. On one July afternoon in 1985, he recorded simply that he had seen Li and had fun. The weather was muggy, and he and his companion changed their plan to return to the East Side and went downtown instead. The brief entry offers no treatment details, but its casual tone shows that seeing Li had become part of his routine rather than an exceptional event.

On another visit, Li gave Warhol dietary instructions: he was to give up bananas, wheat, broccoli, and hot food. The diary records the specific prohibitions without explaining their medical rationale or whether he followed them. This kind of concrete rule sits alongside the less measurable language of energy and crystal work, making Li’s practice, as Warhol presents it, neither exclusively nutritional nor exclusively spiritual.

By November 1985, Warhol reported that Li checked him by pulling on his fingers and told him that he was perfectly aligned. He had not told her about the horrors of the preceding week, yet he contrasted the result with what he had gone through, wondering whether his own strength or Li’s accounted for it. The episode records a moment of reassurance without resolving what caused his distress. Her assessment supplied a positive bodily reading, even as the diary left the preceding ordeal unexplained.

Crystals and Explanations of Illness

Li also interpreted Warhol’s crystal as vulnerable to outside influence. In November, she said it had been invaded, had low energy, and needed to be put in the sun to recharge. Warhol recorded instructions for using it while lying back, with his eyes turned upward until he saw yellow. He speculated that a girl from a bookstore, rather than his brother, had caused the invasion. His account distinguishes Li’s explanation from his own attempts to identify the person responsible: the diagnosis came from Li, while the suspected source remained Warhol’s guess.

The diary places these beliefs beside a longstanding fear of serious illness. Warhol feared cancer, and even a headache or freckle could raise the possibility of a brain or skin cancer. In June 1977, he had undergone a neck biopsy under local anesthesia and waited anxiously for the result; when the doctor told him it was good news, he went to church to give thanks. The biopsy and Li’s later treatments are separate episodes, but together they show how bodily uncertainty recurs in the diary, moving between clinical tests, physical sensations, and alternative systems of interpretation.

A Continuing Relationship in the Diary

Warhol was still seeing Li in March 1986. On that occasion, he said that she was messing up his wig and that his brain was not functioning. Yet he also recorded that he did not know what she did, but felt better after leaving. The remark preserves an unresolved double response: irritation and confusion during the treatment, followed by a bodily sense of improvement. It does not specify what Li did at this appointment, so the relief cannot be attributed to a particular procedure.

Across these encounters, Li is defined less by a single diagnosis than by the variety of explanations and actions Warhol associates with her: resistance tests, pressure-point massage, dietary restrictions, alignment, crystals, and a recurrent feeling of improved well-being. His entries do not establish the medical effectiveness of her methods. They do show why she mattered in his personal record: she offered repeated ways to examine a body that Warhol regarded with apprehension, and a form of reassurance that could coexist with uncertainty rather than eliminate it.