作者姓名：李昱坤

Set in the late 1970s context in which figuration in sculpture had been declared dead, this essay follows Antony Gormley through eight phases: escaping the trap of expressionism, moving from the singular body to collectives and social sculpture, intervening in landscape, and arriving at the body as architecture and as energy field. Li closes with ten transferable strategies, among them turning limitation into resource.

In a 2026 of saturated images, where social media and artificial intelligence reorganise how we see, Li reconsiders Gombrich’s rational, empirically grounded art history and asks whether it has become dated. His answer to Gombrich’s fear that anything goes: the distinctions between significant and insignificant work, and between honest enquiry and posture, still hold — and learning to make them is the usable inheritance.

Set against post-pandemic psychology, the reorganisation of globalisation, accelerating technology and a restructuring market, Li offers a four-part frame — identity, value, practice, media — for Chinese artists entering 2026. He holds that sincerity, thought and innovation are inseparable, forming a core of artistic value exceeding nationality, medium and price, and that when no external standard holds, artists must rebuild one inwardly. The essay is addressed to makers working now without a reliable map.

Listing one hundred core predicaments across ten dimensions — conflicts between mental and material production, between individual expression and social rules, between inherited models and technological change — Li argues these are not private misfortunes but necessary products of the field’s structure. Because structure produces them, structure admits remedies; he undertakes to work through each using theory, industry norms, law and commercial logic.

Drawing historical analogies from the collapsible paint tube and photography to generative AI, Li answers artists’ anxiety about replacement by surveying what AI has already done inside auction houses, galleries and local practice. He offers operative directions: becoming a sophisticated prompter, building generate–feedback–iterate workflows, insisting on locality and site, and returning to craft, materiality and process rather than competing with machines on finish.