LI HEI DI

Existing between figuration and abstraction, Li’s paintings inhabit a space where certainty begins to dissolve. Li understands life as an ongoing act of transformation—an unending negotiation between interior experience and external reality. Their figures are never fixed, continually shifting between states of becoming and allowing the body to function less as a stable form than as a vessel through which memory, emotion, and desire flow. The compositions, rendered in a rich and almost shimmering palette, reveal themselves gradually as forms surface, recede, and transform.

Li’s new paintings document a year of reckoning. “I kept thinking about the Chinese goddess Nüwa, who is believed to have created humans,” Li explains. “She dipped a rope into muddy water and swung the muddy cord through the air. The flying drops of mud turned into common people as they hit the ground. As I transformed throughout the past year, I kept picturing my body, a droplet of mud, flying through midair and dipping back into the fertile mud of possibility. There, I saw many shapes. I moved through them, searching for one I could inhabit, shedding the coat I was given, watching myself in the realm of chaos and hope, my body bouncing between the signified and the signifier, the soul and the form, the home and the body, lack and desire. Slowly, as I waited, I made this body of work. These paintings became more than a documentation of my transition: they were giant listeners. They stretched wide and held me in this chaotic time of reemergence.”

The resulting paintings are at once intimately personal and expansively human. They invite both close looking and the scopic impressions of all-encompassing, dreamlike atmospheres, where fragmentation becomes a condition of transformation rather than loss. Holding beauty and suffering in the same breath, the paintings keep open this fragile tension, where tenderness and force, vulnerability and resilience, remain inseparable. Here, these states of being are not understood as opposing conditions but as experiences through which each is more deeply encountered.

In keeping with the spirit of the paintings, the year of mud is conceived as a continual process of discovery, with different works and relationships unfolding as visitors move through space. A new monograph that both traces the recent development of Li’s painting practice and documents the exhibition will be released by Pace Publishing following the close of the show. The publication will include a new text by Tyler Blackwell, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.