English Writing

Let me begin with a question that seems unnecessary to ask: how do you know that a painting has been painted “badly”?

In this age of AI’s furious ascent, how much dignity is left to realist painting?

Refusing to sentimentalise failure as the prelude to success or as moral posture, Li argues that failure is not an outcome but a necessary output of the contemporary art system’s operation. He analyses how that system manufactures failure and neutralises heterogeneity, then turns to the Chinese context to ask what capacities remain to artists judged to have failed, and whether such judgement must be treated as final.

Extending his model of concept generation, Li uses Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue and Beuys’s practice as founding cases for growing a single idea into a system. The steps: mine the crack inside a concept, draft a programme addressed to oneself, let works generate one another rather than remaining isolated pieces, and practise self-historicisation. Three variables conditioning any such system close the essay.

Tracing artists’ sustained attachment to the empty garment since the later twentieth century, Li reads clothing as sign through Barthes’s Fashion System and follows the line from Beuys’s Felt Suit to contemporary practice across media. He argues the empty garment is full precisely because it is empty: a silent vessel carrying history, memory and future imagination, and a device for asking what remains when every outer layer is removed.

Li dismantles the machinery behind the canon: Medici patronage casting Renaissance taste, the CIA’s covert international promotion of Abstract Expressionism, and today’s auction hammer canonising living artists. He argues this process systematically occluded equally accomplished women, outsiders and dissenters, and that the purpose is not to deny the classics but to ask who decides which stars we are shown. Rewriting begins with the viewer’s gaze.

Written after Jürgen Habermas died on 14 March 2026. Surveying the theory of the public sphere, the shift from a philosophy of the subject to intersubjectivity, the dual structure of lifeworld and system, his debates with postmodernism and the museum as public sphere, Li argues that communicative reason remains the last instrument for recognising one another. Modernity, he concludes, is unfinished and requires new conversation.

Beginning on the floor of Art Basel, Li analyses how mega-galleries squeeze the primary market and how secondary-market pricing and freeport tax avoidance jointly discipline art. He argues that what capital selects are defanged, safe objects, and that galleries may buy every masterpiece of the past yet never the future, which belongs to artists willing to offend while being ignored.

Starting from the gap between compulsory positivity at openings and what the same people say in private, Li traces the critic’s loss of position through the economics of magazines, the equation of price and truth, and market structure. He argues that criticism’s negativity covertly affirms that art admits of better and worse, and that only a market with criticism allocates resources well.

Tonight is the eve of the 2026 lunar Year of the Horse, the Bingwu year. Outside the window there may be the occasional firework, but far more pervasive are the dazzling blessings streaming across digital screens. Across the data flows of the internet and the timelines of social media, a semiotic carnival of the “horse” is underway. The main ident of the CMG Spring Festival Gala — inspired by the seal-script form of the character “horse” and fused with the imagery of galloping steeds — has long since become the visual point of departure for tonight’s narrative. In countless e-cards, brand posters and family-group stickers, galloping red horses and golden steeds carry the ancient wishes of the “dragon-horse spirit” and “swift success”, enveloping this night of farewell and welcome in an unprecedented density of pixels. Car brands have deftly exploited the character “horse” in their names to send New Year greetings to hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers, seamlessly stitching commercial logic onto folk symbols.