Constantly Creating

Li Hongbo Reflects on His Artistic Process

ASIAN ART PRIZE | 4 November 2020

Hongbo, you were the Grand Prize Winner in The 2017 Sovereign Asian Art Prize: how has your career as an artist progressed since then? Can you share any new projects you’ve been working on?

Firstly, thank you very much for awarding me The Sovereign Asian Art Prize. It has given me great encouragement and support, and made me feel more confident to engage in an artistic career.

Currently, I hold one solo exhibition and participate in at least ten group exhibitions every year. I also create more than ten new artworks every year: steadily moving forward according to my own vision. My plan for the next ten years has already begun.

Next year, I have plans to hold solo exhibitions in the United States, France, and China. Due to the pandemic, these exhibitions were postponed to 2021, therefore, the exhibitions overlap. In light of these postponements, I have used 2020 to concentrate on creating and I gained a lot. For example, I created two installation works, Yu and Yunshui, for the Shandong Art Museum this year.

Your winning work, Desire (below), acts as a warning against selfishness and reckless cruelty. Do you believe that art is a means through which we can incite societal change?

Art does not necessarily trigger societal change, but it can provoke thinking and then change the society!

You are well known for your work with paper, what first drew you to this material?

I use paper because it is the most common material in life.

People are familiar with it and it is easy to handle. Everyone has the ability to create with paper, I am only one of them. The affinity, variability and convenience of materials are important factors for me in choosing them.

When using paper, you often render replicas of Ancient Grecian or Renaissance style busts. At first, your paper creations may not look so different from their marble predecessors, until pulled apart to reveal the intricate detail inside. What is the significance of using the flexibility of paper in stark juxtaposition with the rigidity of marble for these works?

Ancient Greek or Renaissance sculptures are classics in the hearts of art practitioners around the world, and are well-known works of art by the public. They are also classic models for teaching painting, for example, when reproducing plaster statues. All this forms a fixed aesthetic paradigm and cognition in people’s minds.

The softness of my work is a relative perception to marble, breaking people’s inherent cognition at the moment when the work is deformed, and this soft deformation also breaks the inherent definitional category of the artistic language we recognize.

It is undoubtedly a difficult time to be working as an artist in the current climate, what can the public do to continue supporting yourself and your fellow artists?

This is a disaster shared by mankind, and no one is spared. We can only try to care for each other more and help each other as much as we can, so that we can all tide over the difficulties and wait for the end of the pandemic.

Hopefully when the pandemic is over, with the help of all of you, everyone will have been able to stick to the career they love. What a beautiful picture that will be!

What a beautiful picture indeed.

You can support Li Hongbo by attending his upcoming international shows in the United States, France and China, scheduled for 2021.

Stay tuned for details on his Instagram and Facebook accounts.

Cover Image Courtesy of Contemporary by Angela Li