ART CITIES: Hong Kong-Li Hei Di

Li Hei Di transmutes impassioned energy into paintings that intertwine biomorphic shapes with oneiric, ethereal environments. Straddling the line between figuration and abstraction, Li’s canvases reveal human appendages visible just beneath atmospheric brushstrokes that gradually emerge as the viewer engages with the work. The artist draws beauty from ephemeral moments, exploring them through texture, balance, and a palette ranging from ambient reds and oranges to saccharine pinks and purples to deep greens and blues.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

In the exhibition “Tongues of Flare”, Li Hei Di presents new paintings and sculpture. Born in Shenyang, China in 1997, Li, who currently lives and works in London, is known for their explorations of human embodiment, displacement, and intimacy in luminous paintings that blend abstraction and figuration. In their vibrant, dreamlike canvases—where ghostly, translucent bodies and body parts pulsate in and out of view amid abstract forms and washes of color—Li embeds latent narratives about gender, repressed and fulfilled desire, and emotional fluidity for viewers to uncover and decipher. Primarily a painter, they also work across sculpture and performance, mediums that complement their otherworldly canvases. The artist’s exhibition spotlights 11 new, never-before-exhibited paintings. Meditating on self-discovery and enactments of physical and spiritual transformation, these works imagine the body as an architecture of energies and feelings—a space where chaos, love, passion, and other phenomena converge and collide. These layered compositions, where spectral figures reveal and obscure themselves at different moments, speak to the complexities of selfhood and the conflicts between our internal selves and forces of the external world. In this group of paintings, the most vulnerable and diaristic works that Li has created to date, the artist continues to use the natural world—in particular, movements and flows of water—as a metaphor for the evolutionary process of becoming one’s self. Wild abstractions rendered in saturated colors oscillate and undulate across their canvases with an oceanic rhythm, fluctuating with each motion of Li’s brush. As with their past bodies of work, they have also drawn inspiration from various literary sources, including Georges Bataille’s “Eroticism: Death and Sensuality”, Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian”, and Torrey Peters’s “Detransition, Baby” for their latest paintings. In these books—particularly in “The Vegetarian,” which tells the story of a woman who becomes increasingly convinced that she is turning into a plant—Li has uncovered new ideas about sexuality, monstrosity, and transfiguration that manifest in their new works. Each painting in this series can be understood as a seed for profound, liberating growth, revealing how change can emerge from the most hidden corners of the self. A new wood sculpture by the artist is on view in the exhibition. Depicting an abstracted body at repose within a cradle-like vessel, this work reflects the state of the physical body and the mind at night during sleep—sinking ever deeper into the shifting, unpredictable world of the unconscious. Presented together in Hong Kong, Li’s paintings and sculpture transport viewers to a realm where the boundaries between life and death, beauty and struggle, and imagination and reality are collapsed.

Photo: Li Hei Di, Liquid Meadow in the Lust of Dawn, 2022, oil on canvas, 67 × 134 inches, © Li Hei Di. Photo courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 12/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, China, Duration: 29/5-29/8/2025, days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.pacegallery.com/