作者姓名：李昱坤

Opening with 2025 displacement figures for Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan and South Sudan, Li treats the refugee crisis as the gravest humanitarian, political and ethical test of the century. Analysing strategies used by artists including Richard Mosse, Banksy, Tiffany Chung, Idris Khan and JR, he distils eight operative approaches: testimony, symbolism and metaphor, intervention, empathy, data visualisation, narrative and personalisation, critique, and collaboration.

Li criticises artists established in the 1980s who have substituted sociability and capital management for sustained work, arguing that what they spend is a dividend produced by information asymmetry rather than by art. Setting out demands for democratised public resources, decentralised market support and an overhaul of the academic system, he asks why the generation after them has been structurally locked out of the market it was promised.

Opening with a question put to the language model DeepSeek, Li addresses the profession’s fear of replacement. He weighs the optimists’ argument that AI is merely a tool against the pessimists’ substitution thesis, and concludes that AI will never eliminate artists from the apex of practice. What matters instead is building depth and enlarging the artist’s irreducible share in the making of the work.

Responding to the allegations against China Academy of Art professor Bai Di (Zhao Aimin), Li distinguishes the emotional practice of condemning the calligraphy along with the man from the institutional accountability that professional ethics demands. He reads the police bulletin as evidence of how online heat forces disclosure, and condemns self-media outlets that published the victim’s name and photographs, inflicting a second injury.

Written without professional motive, this essay examines the industrial character of education: standardised production has replaced care for individual aptitude, while consumerism and quantified targets now script a life. Drawing on deconstructive thinking and on the Greek craftsman Daedalus as counter-metaphor, Li links contemporary spiritual emptiness to the systematic deprivation of children’s native capacities, adding that theory untested in practice is useless.