Li Hongwei: Finding the Balance

Based between Princeton, NJ and Beijing, China, Li is a unique artistic voice within the Chinese diaspora. He has taken the production of Chinese porcelain and metalwork into his own hands, harnessing these mediums to create his own contemporary vocabulary. In 2005, Li Hongwei left China to study ceramic art at the New York State College of Ceramics (Alfred University), receiving his MFA in 2007 and continuing to teach in New York for several years. At the same time, Li embarked on a remarkable exploration of ancient Chinese ceramics, and he began to fuse porcelain with contemporary materials, developing the various series of artworks on view in the current exhibition. One of the artist’s more significant discoveries involves the unpredictable glaze effects that appear in his ceramics—crystalline blooms that emerge at specific temperatures, or ‘atmospheres’, that he engineers within his kilns. These effects have existed since the Song Dynasty, although they have only been appreciated by a small audience over the centuries; Li’s efforts to master these crystalline glazes have led to works that are unlike any that have come before. His sculpture “transcends the monochrome examples of the Song dynasty, yet is more organic and mysterious than the Qing Dynasty examples, decorated with underglaze cobalt blue or copper red” (Andrew L. Maske, University of Kentucky). In terms of contemporary materials, Li’s medium of choice is stainless steel. He fuses, stacks, and embeds his ceramics into the highly reflective metal, using the light from the polished steel to exaggerate and accentuate his ceramic figures. In his Xuan series, the fluid, composite forms appear as water droplets frozen in time; in Upwelling of Gravity, the ceramic and steel appear to rise upward from their base. His perfectly tilted Origin works are as playful as they are regal, and their egg-like forms are echoed in Allegory of Balance, his most monumental body of work, made up of totemic structures that resemble polished, stacked stones. This exhibition features a new series for the artist, as well—Li calls it Empty Vessel. The series takes the most fundamental form of vessel—the bowl—as its starting point, yet deliberately dissolves its functional reference, transforming it from an object of containment into a structure about emptiness itself. The sculptural wall pieces recall the concave, mirrored works of Anish Kapoor, but their curved, ceramic edges imbue the series with a sense of warmth, juxtaposing the polished steel surface in the middle of each vessel. According to Li, “The vessel exists through emptiness, and emptiness becomes visible through the vessel. The series translates the Eastern philosophical notion of ‘emptiness as receptivity’ into a contemporary language, allowing form to recede before space itself, so that ‘empty’ becomes the true subject.”