Li Hongwei 李鴻韋

Li Hongwei (b.1980) is a contemporary artist who works and lives in Beijing and New York. He first gained recognition for his early series “Weight of Meditation”. In recent years, he has earned broader attention by integrating crystalline porcelain glazes with materials such as stainless steel in his work, fully expressing his reflections on and insights into life.

 

Li Hongwei began exploring painting and sculpture in his youth. He was admitted to the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2000, graduating in 2005 before advancing his studies in New York, USA. In 2007, he graduated from the Ceramics Art program at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He started experimenting with diverse materials in his sculptural practice in 2009. By 2014, he had successfully fused industrial materials like stainless steel with ceramic, marking a shift in his creative focus from "traditional sculpture centered on form" to "site-specific installation art with spatial characteristics." This evolution embodies his philosophical inquiry into relationships of dependency, opposition, transformation, and cycles. Li Hongwei has also frequently been invited as a visiting artist to lecture at universities, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

 

His works are held in the permanent collections of numerous internationally renowned museums, such as the British Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Art Institute of Chicago, Israel Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. They have been exhibited at prestigious institutions including the National Art Museum of China, Embassy of the United States (Beijing), Art Institute of Chicago, New Mexico Museum of Art, Penn State’s Palmer Museum of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Dublin Castle in Ireland.