Bio - Lihong Bai 

At the heart of Lihong Bai's artistic exploration lies a profound inquiry into the nature of belonging and identity within ever-shifting landscapes. “As a ghost traversing different landscapes, constantly seeking a sense of belonging.” She always calls herself this way; she always doubts, her practice questions what a painting can be today. How can we move beyond a projection into a spatial material encounter?

This foundational unrest propels during all of the practice of Lihong Bai (b. 1999). A London-based multidisciplinary artist born in Inner Mongolia, interrogates the precarity of belonging through a radical deconstruction of landscape. After 15 years immersed in the traditions of Chinese landscape painting, she reconceptualizes the natural world not as a static idyll-ShanShui山水, but as a contested site shaped by migration, power relations, and ecological exhaustion.

Her methodology, defined by an "aesthetics of rupture," utilizes tearing, burning, and abrasion as analytical strategies to dismantle the myth of the landscape as a neutral container. In Weeds 野艸, destruction operates as a generative act: the artist’s body scrapes architectural surfaces and tears fibers—a direct confrontation with the inertia of spatial structures and the sedimented histories they represent. In her film, I Have a Sheep Joint Bone我有一對羊關節骨, she reframes identity as porous and provisional. By positioning ritual remains as "non-human witnesses" to systemic volatility, she challenges conventional diasporic narratives through a visceral and haunting visual language. Her practice ultimately navigates the "untranslatable" space between institutional protocols and the visceral struggle for re-rooting within unstable social structures.

Lihong holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2024) and a BA with First-Class Honours from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, where she received the Dean’s Award for Chinese Traditional painting. In 2024, she was endorsed as an Arts Council England Exceptional Talent. At the Malta Biennale (2024), The Joy of Water and Fish 魚水之歡 interrupts the stillness of ink painting through performance, letting desire and memory circulate as fluid, unstable energies in which viewers become collaborators in the process of deconstruction. The exhibition at Somerset House (2025) engaged audiences with paintings reflective of urban decay. Her work at the Shanghai International Art Festival (2025) served as a commentary on rapid ecological changes in megacities and a reflection on the intersection of environment and urban life. At Messums West (2026), her pieces underscored the fragility of heterotopia. Her five-day endurance performance—selected by the Royal College of Art as a seminal graduate project—was presented at the British Consulate in Los Angeles (2025). Within this high-stakes institutional setting, by pushing the body to its physical limits, Lihong revealed the porous nature of identity and belong.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Beijing Contemporary Art Museum and the Museum of East Asian Art, Bath, recognized for its significant dialogue with Sino-British transcultural frictions. A forthcoming monograph (2026) by Alexandra Steinacker-Clark will provide the first comprehensive critical survey of her evolving practice. As Lihong continues to navigate the terrain of belonging, her work remains a vital inquiry into where belonging might land next. What new dimensions of identity and place will Lihong's future explorations uncover in the ever-changing landscapes she examines? How might her art continue to challenge prevailing narratives and invite us to reconsider our own perceptions of belonging?