作者姓名：李昱坤

Surveying Yoshiko Shimada’s prints, photography, performance and curatorial work since the late 1980s, Li shows how her practice dissects suppressed responsibility for Japan’s modern wars, above all the contradictory position of women as both victims and accomplices. He identifies three strategies: calculated appropriation of imperial imagery, collaborative body-narrative, and sustained dialogue with artists and institutions outside Japan. Thirty years of work demonstrate, he concludes, that before historical injustice silence is not an option.

On the death of the critic, poet and painter Daozi (Wang Min) on 1 September 2025, Li traces an intellectual itinerary from Qingdao through Xi’an and Chongqing to Beijing. He examines what translating Lyotard taught Daozi about the end of grand narratives, his genealogical work on postmodern art, and his late practice of sacred ink, conceived as redemption within a theological horizon.

Defining pharmaceutical dependence — from illicit drugs to the misuse of prescriptions — as a silent epidemic reaching office cubicles and suburban bedrooms, Li traces its roots along four lines: the brain’s reward circuitry, existential unbearability, structural social pressure and consumer culture. He then sets out five artistic strategies: confessional autobiography, cold metaphor, social documentation, visualised psychic landscape, and interrogation of the body.

Reading Li Youyi’s recent painting against Ni Zan’s aesthetics of barren cold, Li argues that the artist reworks a Chan-derived traditional spirit in a modern Western idiom: reduced form, restrained brushwork, empty passages and eroded surfaces together produce a post-industrial desolation. He presents this as an inquiry into matter itself, made in an age when everything can be reproduced instantaneously.

Taking the everyday environment of cameras, algorithms and protocols as its starting point, this essay reads surveillance through Foucault’s account of panopticism, in which the mere possibility of being watched internalises discipline. Li surveys nineteen artists — from Julia Scher, Trevor Paglen and Zach Blas to Xu Bing and Ge Yulu — asking how art exposes surveillance structures and reopens public debate on security and freedom.