Nike China, 2007

Li Lihong   Emerging artists

Li Lihong is from JiangXi province, more precisely from the famous Jin Dezhen village where royal Chinese porcelain has been produced for centuries.

He learned the art of ceramics from the great master Qin Xiling. Unlike his master's more traditional work, Li Lihong draws inspiration from the great ceramic creations of China and brings a contemporary touch to them.

Nourished by a thousand-year-old tradition, surrounded by the greatest ceramic creations in China, LI Lihong has dreamed since his youngest age of being a very great ceramist, in the image of his illustrious ancestors and his guide, the great master Qin Xiling, while endowing his works with a modern breath.

Internalizing all the influences of contemporary society, from advertising to consumer culture (with the arrival in China in the 1980s of large firms such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's), he transcribes in his ceramics the ancestral quality of porcelain and the confrontation between tradition and modernity, as well as the meeting between East and West. His sculptures, often gilded or silver (and more rarely, white or colored) incorporate the blue and white aesthetic of traditional porcelain decorations.

Using the most experienced techniques of Chinese ceramics, Li Lihong achieves this astonishing blend of minimalist forms, geometric or curved lines, to go beyond the limits of traditional ceramics. With these elements of daily life, he thus expresses, through his plastic language, the change in Chinese society and its capacity to assimilate the diverse cultures with which it is confronted.