Bio

Lihong Bai (b. 1999, Ordos, Inner Mongolia) works across painting, performance, installation, and spatial intervention. Trained in Chinese landscape painting before completing her MA at the Royal College of Art, London, Bai reconceives ShanShui 山水 not as a natural idyll but as a contemporary spatial condition — a landscape made of transit systems, borders, capital, migration, and surveillance.

Working between ink, body, architecture, and public space, she examines how identities are constructed, displaced, and renegotiated within global infrastructures. Whether eating dry grass in a moving Underground carriage or scraping ink across gallery walls, her body becomes the instrument that tests where institutional order ends and instinct begins. Belonging, in her work, is not a fixed state but a fragile negotiation between body, territory, and power.

"As a ghost traversing different landscapes, constantly seeking a sense of belonging" — for Bai, restlessness is not incidental, but method.

Bai has been endorsed by the UK Global Talent route through Arts Council England. Her work has been presented at the Malta Biennale (2024), Somerset House (2025), the Shanghai International Art Festival (2025), Messums West (2026), and the British Consulate General in Los Angeles (2025), with forthcoming presentations including a solo exhibition at M+ M Gallery, Hong Kong, and ART021 Shanghai (October–December 2026). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Beijing Contemporary Art Museum and the Museum of East Asian Art, Bath.