Li Hui was born in the late 1970s in Beijing, China's political and economic center. The late '70s marked a period of major transition in China, when new political forces were coming to the fore and replacing the old. The ensuing years brought constant and rapid changes on both the political and economic fronts in China, engendering a concomitant transformation in peoples' system of values. Traditional cultural thought, stifled by decades of governmental restrictions, began to undergo a process of revitalization, as people responded to challenges of cultural influence from abroad. For Li Hui's generation, the experience of constant ideological shifts and dramatic social changes have shaken received historical views, confounded established values, and resulted in a deep sense of ambiguity as regards politics, society, ideology and lifestyle. It is thus not surprising to find that in the works of artists and writers born in post-1970 China, we may find less angst, but a great deal more uncertainty than in the art of the preceding generations. Li Hui and his contempories explore their doubts and misgivings in the midst of a bustling society, through the virtual reality of the Internet, and in the pathways of a world where everyone is seeking instant fame. They have in these explorations managed to develop their own voices and their own kind of individual appeal. Among them, Li Hui is an artist whose works are not only appealing, but truly moving.

Li Hui graduated with honours in 2003 from the Sculpture Department of the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. In the short span of five years, Li's work has attracted international attention, making him one of the most successful young sculptors of his generation. Curators and collectors familiar with his work know that this relatively rapid success is not fortuitous, but well deserved.

My own interest in Li Hui's work began when I encountered his stainless steel sculpture Guzheng. In this sophisticated, double-edged work, Li Hui sculpted the form of a military aircraft carrier and then inverted it, transforming its hull into the body of a classical Chinese musical instrument known as the guzheng (a 25-stringed zither. Imitating the strings of a guzheng, steel wires stretched from one end of the hull to the other, while the hull itself appeared to have been pounded by some powerful force. Among these strings, one was broken, and it transfixed my attention like brilliant points of light in a painting, evoking a surge of images in my mind. I stood rooted to the spot, completely fascinated. The curved steel plate was like an iron fortification being bombarded by the zheng's surging waves of sound. This phenomenon of sound waves penetrating steel relates directly to concepts fundamental in the training of Chinese Daoists: "The great sound is scarcely voiced; The great image has no form; The softest thing in the world rides roughshod over the strongest." In this way, Li Hui leads the viewer to reflect more deeply on questions of war and of peace. At the time, I reacted to this work on a purely visceral level. Later, I met with Li Hui on a foggy Beijing evening to discuss his work.

Tall and stocky, with his long hair twisted into a bun, Li Hui has a straightforward gaze that imparts an air of no-nonsense frankness. Yet when he breaks into his trademark dimpled smile, another side of him is revealed¡Xa side that is ingenuous and full of curiousity. Li proclaims himself to be a firm believer in the Zen concept that everything is contained in the present moment, and quotes a line from an ancient Zen text¡XCollected Essentials of the Five Lamps of the Southern Song dynasty-- to underscore this point. Following this code, Li Hui does not allow himself to get bogged down in extraneous problems, but is intensely focused on the present task of perfecting himself as an artist. In conversation with Li, I was surprised and deeply impressed by his grasp of Eastern and Western philosophical theories. Consciously or unconsciously, it is clear that in his creative process he incorporates elements of this philosophical understanding into his work, with the result that while he does not deal with popular political or social topics, people from a broader spectrum of society are able to relate to his art.

The majority of Li Hui's works make use in some way of transportation vehicles, such as the aforementioned aircraft carrier, or that object of contemporary desire, the sports car. In 2003, Li Hui created a work in which he fused the front ends of two military jeeps, each facing the opposite direction, and thus created the impression of a vehicle simultaneously moving forwards and backwards. Through this visual disruption, the artist forces the viewer to rethink the concepts of advance and retreat. I was reminded of the passage in the Book of Changes which states that "Change is precisely the phenomenon of advance and retreat." This sculpture, entitled Current and Countercurrent, may be seen to symbolize the attitude of the the post-'70's generation towards the continuous changes in China's social ecology. It may also represent the artist's own perspective on life: whether he is moving with the current or against it, he always faces his situation squarely and with a forthright attitude.

After 2003, Li Hui began to work with transparent acrylic panels and LED lights to create a series of sculptural works, including Meridians, Ark, Amber, and Buddhist Altar, all of which have become much sought after by international collectors. Meridians comprises the figure of a standing Buddha, sculpted from horizontally layered acrylic panels. Its compact, minimalist structure and flowing lines reveal the technical mastery that Li Hui achieved from his five years of intensive training in western sculptural technique at the Central Academy. Despite this being a Buddha's form, blinking LED lights placed inside indicate the acupuncture points found within the human body, thus visually revealing the close relationship between the Buddha and humankind, and indicating that perfected humanity ultimately results in the Buddha nature. In a broader sense, Li Hui's work reminds us that throughout the five thousand years of Chinese history, those powerful figures regarded as sacrosanct or divine, whether buddhas or monsters, ultimately have all been human.

Li Hui's creative process and his selection of materials reveal other important aspects of the artist's approach. Each work is based on precisely detailed computer graphics rather than on a traditonal template. Li Hui's sensitivity towards materials means that he is very particular in his selection and very precise in the way he uses them, and this is one of the key reasons behind he strongly unique quality of his pieces. Li Hui mainly works with industrial materials, and while those materials in one sense confirm the modernity of his works, they also present a challenge to the artist in that he must consider how to eliminate the original coldness of the materials and infuse them with an emotional quality. This is a challenge that Li Hui has faced, and solved with great success.

In his most recent works, Li Hui employs the latest laser technology to create a series of haunting effects. In one work, a lamb is boiled in a transparent water jar made of acrylic panels: life is vaporized, and the slowly rising mist resembles the soul, ascending, drifting and dispersing along with the laser rays. The effect is reminiscent of an ancient ritual sacrifice. Through the manner in which he manipulates the laser beams, Li Hui seems to make manifest a formless, invisible power. If we believe that the soul is the essence of life, then by extension we are witnessing how this strange power extracts and agglomerates our life's essence-- in other words, the soul. In this work, Li Hui seems to be invoking the necessity of re-evaluating the existence of one's own soul within the context of mundane reality: life may be finite, but the soul lives on forever in an unknowable space.

Cage, another of Li Hui's laser works, is both his most minimal and conceptually most complex work. The "cage" here is actually a square form constructed completely of light beams, emanating from four laser tubes fixed to the ground. The viewer entering into this virtual cage experiences varying degrees of psychological dislocation. This work incorporates a number of different principles from modern and contemporary western sculptural art. With a Cubist geometric form as the main structure and a virtual sense of volume created by the laser beams, Cage becomes a thoroughly spatial sculpture, realizing the concept of non-dimensional spatial sculpture explored by Constructivism. It is a dynamic work requiring the viewer's involvement and conceptual response, and has obvious links to deconstructionism. As the audience enters the cage, their psychological response triggers both an emotional and an intellectual process which, to a certain extent, deconstructs the narrow binary mode of thinking.

In response to the question of how he distils and integrates elements of other art and artists into his own artistic language, Li Hui explains that in his five years of study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts he undertook an in-depth exploration of western art history: from classical Greek sculpture to post-Renaissance Rodin, from Duchamps to Beuys¡Kand how later, under the guidance of his advisor, Sui Jianguo, he arrived on the doorstep of Chinese contemporary sculpture. The accumulated experience of Li Hui's journey has become the foundation of his creative process. Clearly, these influences, absorbed into his subconscious, flow spontaneously and naturally, adding layers of complexity and fascnation to Li Hui's works.

As for Li Hui's expectations of his future path, my feeling is that perhaps it may best be described through the words of another Zen master, Qingyuan Weixin of the Tang dynasty: When I had not yet begun to study Zen thirty years ago, I thought that mountains are mountains and waters are waters. Later when I studied personally with my master, I entered realization and understood that mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters. Now that I abide in the way of no-seeking, I see as before that mountains are just mountains, waters are just waters.

These three stages of Zen practice clearly illustrate the human process of perception: from the original perception to a re-thinking and finally back to the original. The same is true in the process of artistic creation, wherein the artist moves from the banal to the sublime, and then ultimately to the stage where he is able to use the banal to manifest the sublime. I believe that, with his keen sensitivity for materials and his own depth of wisdom, Li Hui will manifest just such a realm for his audience.

Huang Lingling
Oct 2007

translated by Valerie C. Doran