Lihong Bai (白莉鸿)

Lihong Bai(1999.)’s practice operates at the intersection of migration, ecological instability, and material transformation. Working across performance, painting, and moving image, she draws on a foundation in traditional Chinese ink painting but approaches materials—ink, Xuan paper, medicinal herbs, and animal remains—as collaborators with their own rhythms and agency.

Through acts of tearing, abrasion, burning, and layering, Lihong investigates how one can find grounding amid continual movement. For her, migration is not only a personal narrative but an ongoing condition—an unsettled state that continually reshapes relationships to materials, places, and people. Rooting, in this sense, is not a simple return or act of settling, but a dynamic process shaped by rupture, instability, and the friction of material encounters.

This approach centers the agency of matter itself. In Weeds (野艸), destruction becomes a method of creation: the artist’s body scrapes architectural surfaces and tears fibers, directly confronting rigid spatial structures. Ink serves not merely as a medium for image-making but as a force that stains, disperses, and lingers—registering anxiety and uncertainty without resolving into simple representation. In Compendium of Materia Medica (本草綱目), medicinal herbs—traditionally symbols of healing—are shaped, engraved, and cremated, returning to the earth as carbon and ash. These works locate care, exhaustion, and mortality within broader cycles of living, dying, and decomposing. Likewise, 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.

Lihong’s upbringing on the grasslands continues to shape her perspective. Her practice seeks to move beyond a human-centered view by engaging with interspecies relationships. By collecting animal bones from ritual slaughter as witnesses to ecological change, she reframes identity as porous, provisional, and deeply intertwined with broader political and ecological systems.

Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Malta Biennale, Somerset House, and the Shanghai International Arts Festival, and featured in publications like FAD Magazine and Artron. An artist monograph is forthcoming in 2026. Bai’s pieces are held in collections such as the Beijing Contemporary Art Museum and the Museum of East Asian Art, Bath. Across these experiences, she posits rooting as a continuous process—one shaped by uncertainty, transformation, and shared vulnerability.