Writing
LI YUKUN COLUMN
The column collects my published writing: field notes from the Chinese contemporary art scene, a running self-audit of critical method, and a persistent inquiry into the real relationship between artists, exhibitions, and their times. Every text is authored by Li Yukun.
The Archive
Essays archived
Years of writing
Chinese characters
Author throughout
Each essay is published in Chinese, with an English title and a short abstract provided here so that the column can be read without Chinese. Selected essays are now available in full English translation; further translations are in progress.
Start HereSelected Essays
If you are going to read five essays, read these. Chosen for methodological representativeness, thematic coverage and legibility to readers outside China.
How Exactly Is a Contemporary Artist’s ‘Concept’ Made?
当代艺术家的“观念”，究竟是怎样炼成的？
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.
Why start here: The only text that states the author’s model of concept generation outright; the key to everything written afterwards and the single best place to begin.
Observation, Intervention, Translation: A Complete Path to Criticality in Contemporary Art
观察、介入与转译：构建当代艺术“批判性”的完整行动路径
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.
Why start here: Turns archival intervention into an executable method; the clearest statement of the author’s critical position.
Chiharu Shiota: How Memory Keeps Speaking After Matter Disappears
日本女艺术家盐田千春：一部记忆在物质消亡后如何继续“发声”的策略史
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.
Why start here: The most internationally legible case here; the object–thread–memory structure makes it an ideal first text.
How Did the Art World Kill the Art Critic, Step by Step?
艺术圈是怎么一步步把艺术批评家“杀”死的？
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.
Why start here: The most candid statement of the author’s own position: why criticism fails, argued structurally rather than morally.
The Hunting of the Art Market: How Capital Logic Kills Art
艺术市场的猎杀：资本逻辑是如何把艺术做死的？
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.
Why start here: A complete account of the gallery–auction–capital chain, built on institutions international readers already know.
Browse by CategoryCategories
Every essay carries one primary category. Click a category to filter the list below.
Browse by ThemeThemes
The first seven are the author’s core methodological positions; the rest are recurring subjects extracted from the corpus.
Recurring subjects
Timeline 2019–2026Timeline
By year, with essay counts, the direction of the writing, and key texts.
Begins from an actual auction record; the starting question is whether price equals value.
Criticism applied outside art for the first time; the care for the most vulnerable becomes a measure.
No essays published this year.
Turns to the practitioner’s own conditions, showing who bears the cost.
Inherits predecessors’ questions through obituary form; ‘is art over’ becomes ‘who decides what art is worth’.
Treats academies, professional ethics and public outrage as structural rather than moral questions.
The year method consolidates: a model of concept generation is proposed, observation–intervention–translation becomes reusable, and case studies expand to three Japanese artists.
The question shifts from whether a method holds to who recognises its outcome: institutions and the market become primary objects.
Recommended Reading PathsReading Paths
Choose an entry point by who you are.
First-time visitor
Read the method first, then the executable path, then one artist read closely.
Curator
All three are exhibition-shaped: a subject that fills space, a spatial practice, and a theme large enough for a group show.
Critic or writer
Start with why criticism failed, then how it is built, then how to read symptomatically.
Researcher
One methodological model, one critique of the canon, one account of Chinese philosophical grounding.
Artist
Directly operational texts: how to build a practice, how to survive new tooling, and what failure actually is.
On Failure in Contemporary Art: Why 99.5% of Artists Are Made to Fail
当代艺术失败论：为什么99.5%的艺术家是被失败的？
Institutional Analysis · 65 min read
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.
Institutional Critique · Chinese Contemporary Art Ecosystem · Capital and the Art Market
How Should an Artist Develop a Concept Systematically?
当代艺术家如何系统性展开自己的观念？
Art Criticism Methodology · 52 min read
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.
Writing and Artistic Method · Methodological Legacy
Presence in Absence: An Art History of the Empty Garment and the Displaced Body
缺席的在场：一部被取代身体主体的“空衣”艺术史
Image Politics · 73 min read
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.
Rematerialisation · Body, Gender and Identity · Symptomatic Reading
Art History Is a ‘Legitimate Fraud’ Written by the Survivors of Power
艺术史是一部由权力幸存者书写的“合法骗局”
Institutional Analysis · 50 min read
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.
Art Historiography and the Canon · Institutional Critique · Capital and the Art Market
Farewell to Habermas: The Coordinates He Left Are Our Last Instrument Against Barbarism
告别哈贝马斯：他留下的坐标，是防止世界滑向野蛮的最后工具
Institutional Analysis · 88 min read
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.
Institutional Critique · Methodological Legacy
The Hunting of the Art Market: How Capital Logic Kills Art
艺术市场的猎杀：资本逻辑是如何把艺术做死的？
Art Market Analysis · 47 min read
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.
Capital and the Art Market · Institutional Critique
Selected
How Did the Art World Kill the Art Critic, Step by Step?
艺术圈是怎么一步步把艺术批评家“杀”死的？
Institutional Analysis · 59 min read
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.
Institutional Critique · Capital and the Art Market
Selected
Antony Gormley’s Strategic Revival: Detonating Contemporary Sculpture with an ‘Obsolete’ Body
安东尼·葛姆雷的策略性复活：如何用“过时”的身体，引爆当代雕塑？
Artist Case Studies · 43 min read
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.
Rematerialisation · Body, Gender and Identity
How Should We Remember E. H. Gombrich Today?
今天我们怎样纪念贡布里希？
Contemporary Aesthetics · 28 min read
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.
Art Historiography and the Canon · Technology, AI and Image Production
Opening 2026: Recasting Artistic Value in an Age Without Standards
2026开篇：在标准缺失时代，重铸艺术价值的三位一体
Contemporary Aesthetics · 17 min read
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.
Chinese Contemporary Art Ecosystem · Technology, AI and Image Production · Artistic Value and Judgement
In Print
Long-form criticism is also collected in five completed book manuscripts — see Publications. A formal record of everything written is kept in the Writing Record.