English Writing

Opening with Benjamin’s death on the Spanish border in 1940 and the storm of progress described in his theses on history, Li argues that progress continues to pile up ruins. Faithful inheritance means not repeating jargon but choosing, within an art economy ruled by traffic and capital, to be a flâneur, a ragpicker and a destructive character who keeps critical reflection alive.

Treating Japan’s defeat as the decisive condition of Meiro Koizumi’s practice, Li traces how the spiritual vacuum left by the emperor’s declaration of humanity, the national memory of collective victimhood and a crushed salaryman masculinity enter the work. He analyses directed performance, extreme facial close-ups and the collapse of speech as techniques converting the viewer’s discomfort into critique rather than spectacle.

Beginning from Mao’s question of for whom art is made and from his epistemology of practice, Li argues that many Chinese artists have retreated into petty sentiment, trivial everydayness and hollow conceptual games, losing contact with the social process around them. He proposes translating Mao’s spiritual core — self-transformation, enquiry and empathy — rather than his period slogans, into a renewed greater self.

Taking Jason Allen’s Midjourney-generated Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial, winner of the digital art prize at the 2022 Colorado State Fair, as its case, Li argues that Beuys’s promise of creative equality has curdled: once algorithms can produce professional images, everyone creates and few are free. He reads the slogan as betrayed rather than fulfilled, and calls for recovering social sculpture under present technical conditions.

Focusing on Chiharu Shiota’s room-encompassing installations of red, black and white thread, Li reads the semiotics of keys, shoes, beds and windows, and argues that a practice rooted in childhood trauma, expatriate identity and a fight with cancer exceeds autobiography to address collective memory, historical trauma and social reality. Memory, in this reading, survives the disappearance of the objects that carried it.

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.

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.

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.

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.