作者姓名：李昱坤

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.

Written for the anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s death on 5 December. Moving from her analysis of the origins of totalitarianism through the banality of evil to the threefold active life of labour, work and action, Li argues that the disappearing public realm is modernity’s central crisis. Thinking, speaking and acting with others remain capacities available to every newcomer, and her work is read as an invitation to begin again.

Cataloguing twenty-four formulae that wear contemporary form without contemporary substance — endlessly replicated political pop, cheap translation of tradition, philosophical padding, pseudo-social engagement, oversized canvases and more — Li argues that such work steals both the name of art and the value of contemporaneity. Answering it requires not better marketing but an independent critical ecology and patient patronage. The twenty-four patterns are named so that they can be recognised and refused.

The first essay in the author’s series on contemporary artistic method. Rejecting static formulas, Li proposes a dynamic model of concept generation in which practice emerges from five interacting forces: historical coordinates, social context, awareness of medium, conceptual core and personal experience. He closes with artificial intelligence, posthumanism and the Anthropocene as emergent drivers, making this the key to his later essays.

Li addresses what he calls Xiong Shili’s eloquent absence from art discourse: although Xiong wrote no systematic aesthetics, his New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness — fusing Yogācāra Buddhism, Confucian learning of the heart-mind and the Book of Changes — supplies an ontological ground for Chinese art more fundamental than any treatise. Returning to this root is presented as the only way forward.