Arguing that mere biological survival is only one form of life, Li holds that artists should study life rather than mere living. He criticises contemporary art’s fixation on pathologised bodies and on gestures that are noisy but inert, and proposes an art-as-life framework that redefines artistic direction and value so that the work finally serves the making of the human.
当代艺术就是洪水猛兽。活着只是生命的一个形式，生命应该有许多形式，艺术的生命、信仰的生命、草木尘埃的生命，乃至万物的生命。研究活着容易陷入虚无，因为器官的衰竭无可避免，而所有的抗争都只是规律。
Written on the death of the German art historian Hans Belting. Measuring his own decade in the field between Danto’s thesis of the end of art and Belting’s dismantling of linear art-historical narrative, Li surveys Belting’s founding of the interdisciplinary research project on image, media and body and his European chair at the Collège de France, insisting that Belting himself never held art to be finished.
宣告结束也意味着手开始。看到法融禅师的一句话：恰恰用心时，恰恰无心用，无心恰恰用，常用恰恰无。结合起今天的艺术，越发觉得这是一句不全的话，无奈，吊诡，充满悲伤和认命。十年前，我刚步入艺术行业时，阿瑟.丹托去世了，我走进不再线性、光怪陆离的艺术行业当中，支撑我的是于文化的敬畏和一种新鲜、奇怪的憧憬
A memorial essay for the young ink painter Wang Ze, written after his sudden death in the summer of 2022. Li recalls their friendship in Beijing’s Songzhuang art district — above all the night Wang helped him move house across the New Year — and appends more than twenty of Wang’s xieyi ink paintings. Private memory here doubles as documentary record of a little-known painter’s materials, subjects and working conditions.
可怜荒垄穷泉骨，曾有惊天动地文。二零二二年的夏天，有一个中午非常热，有朋友来找我，我懒洋洋地出门，哈着热气，与他开玩笑，走进一家餐馆。他问我怎么来到宋庄了，我说去年年底和女朋友分手后无处可去，我和一位叫王泽的青年画家朋友，一块把我的东西搬来宋庄了。“真是凄凄惨惨。
Beginning with a question he once asked online as a teenager, Li draws on publicly reported child sexual abuse cases from 2013 to 2016 — 1,401 reported cases, more than 2,568 victims, 10,782 convictions for child molestation — to examine the structural and cultural risks Chinese girls face while growing up. He argues that the first measure of any social system is its capacity to protect the most vulnerable among its members.
我们一路奋战，是为了不让世界改变我们。记得很久以前，当我还是个男孩子的时候，我在网上问过：为什么有人会对未成年少女盯着不放呢？记得有人回答过，说就像吃一颗草莓，已经熟了的，又甘甜又硕大的草莓，可能获得得的只是触觉生理上的快感。
Taking Leng Jun’s Portrait of Xiao Jiang — hammered at 61 million RMB and sold for 70.15 million with fees at China Guardian’s 2019 autumn sale — as its point of departure, this essay argues that a record price delivers not art-historical progress but a false hope manufactured by the market. Li contends that Chinese oil painting remains dependent on Soviet-style realism and borrowed Western idioms, while academies and criticism have failed to renew their standards. He urges artists and collectors not to mistake price for value.
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