English Writing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.