English Writing

Set in the late 1970s context in which figuration in sculpture had been declared dead, this essay follows Antony Gormley through eight phases: escaping the trap of expressionism, moving from the singular body to collectives and social sculpture, intervening in landscape, and arriving at the body as architecture and as energy field. Li closes with ten transferable strategies, among them turning limitation into resource.

In a 2026 of saturated images, where social media and artificial intelligence reorganise how we see, Li reconsiders Gombrich’s rational, empirically grounded art history and asks whether it has become dated. His answer to Gombrich’s fear that anything goes: the distinctions between significant and insignificant work, and between honest enquiry and posture, still hold — and learning to make them is the usable inheritance.

Set against post-pandemic psychology, the reorganisation of globalisation, accelerating technology and a restructuring market, Li offers a four-part frame — identity, value, practice, media — for Chinese artists entering 2026. He holds that sincerity, thought and innovation are inseparable, forming a core of artistic value exceeding nationality, medium and price, and that when no external standard holds, artists must rebuild one inwardly. The essay is addressed to makers working now without a reliable map.

Listing one hundred core predicaments across ten dimensions — conflicts between mental and material production, between individual expression and social rules, between inherited models and technological change — Li argues these are not private misfortunes but necessary products of the field’s structure. Because structure produces them, structure admits remedies; he undertakes to work through each using theory, industry norms, law and commercial logic.

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.

Against the dilution of criticality, Li defines it in three registers: negativity, the determinate transcendence of the negation of the negation, and social practice that challenges inequality. He then proposes observation, intervention and translation as an operative path, supported by an interdisciplinary toolbox and worked cases. The essay offers practitioners an instrument for building argument into their work rather than a slogan to display.

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.