SHANGHAI.- LINSEED now presenting Li Hei Di’s first worldwide solo exhibition, “Tits at Dawn”, featuring the artist’s latest series of works. The exhibition opened on November 11th, 2022, and will end on December 18th, 2022. Alvin Li, author, contributing editor of Frieze, and the Adjunct Curator, Greater China, Supported by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, at Tate, recently visited the artist’s studio and had a conversation about Li Hei Di’s current practice, study and research references, writes the following article regarding the exhibition:
"I visited Li Hei Di’s studio in west London on a Thursday in early October. The 25-year-old painter, dressed in all black with a short perm, was rocking a style as distinct as her work. She never sketches before a painting, determined to “follow her feelings.” She says this leaves her in a constant state of anxiety, though sounding perfectly at ease as she says it. I can empathize with that feeling, that thrill of not knowing, of leaving the course of events to affects, drives, and want. It’s painting as a crime of passion, and crimes of passion are often addictive.
If one had to summarize the character of Li’s work, the first words that come to mind are: promiscuous, dream-like, in flux. That the artist doesn’t sketch only attests to her highly- developed sense of space; there are always multiple layers, perspectives, and narratives going on on each canvas. Still life does not appear still, but floats, melts, is on the verge of shape- shifting. Oval figures recur throughout—oranges, peaches, bubbles, pearls—all of which, in Bataillean fashion, evoke an erotic energy. Surely there is a deeply erotic dimension to these works: one almost catches a contour of bodies in coitus playing hide and seek. But unlike the general tone of that genre, in which the erotic act is so all-consuming that it utterly suspends narrative, Li sutures her erotics into larger worlds where many other things are happening at once. If erotic painting is akin to pornography, Li’s works are more a kind of romance fiction, with the love shared by its protagonists as but one of many ongoing threads woven into a fabric of bliss and play. They’re sometimes hilarious, too, as in All Day Long, I Watched the Land Break up into Ocean (2022), where an otherwise opaque and sensual scene reveals, upon close examination, a battle between two penises urinating.
Another recurring motif in Li’s work is wrapping, or veiling. Objects and bodies are often seen through a layer of membranous foil that partially obscures vision, creating an effect of looking at something in a fish tank with your nose against the glass case. This trope has allowed the artist to blend the wild mix of images she collects from popular visual culture—from wuxia film stills to portraits of Zhou Xun—into a purée, which she then applies to her canvases like a lingering impression, or a wisp of body heat. More than just a visual effect, this penchant also marks the significant influence on Li’s work and worldview of certain literary metaphors, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Wang Xiaobo. In Xiaobo’s book Love in an Age of Revolution, the author uses the image of a wet duvet cover to frame a range of personal observations, from the nature of the human condition—vital matter beneath a soft shell—to sexual desire and adulthood. In Li’s works, this wrapping becomes a meta-commentary on the inevitability of seeing life through the veil of metaphor. We only encounter existence as illusions, as Nietzsche might have put it: the veil of Maya.
Tits at dawn. Are we being taken on a journey to the forest, or to the painter’s bed? Apparently, when it comes to these paintings, it’s not a question of either/or: in Li’s paintings—or fiction— worlds (and words) can always collapse into co-existence as one."
- Alvin Li, November 2022
