Asia Art Center is pleased to present the exhibition Heavenly Realm, Mortal World: Spiritual Journey through the Mundane World — Li Chen Ink-Black Sculpture 2020-2023, from March 15 to June 8, 2025. This exhibition marks the artist Li Chen’s solo show in Beijing after a six-year interval since the 2019 exhibition Ethereal Cloud: Li Chen New Works. The showcase will feature nearly twenty recent works from Li Chen’s Spiritual Journey through the Mundane World.
The great Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai, in his Ancient Lunar Song, evokes the moon as the symbol of transcendence: “When I was young, I did not recognize the moon, calling it a white jade plate. I also wondered if it was the mirror of heavenly realm, flying in the high clouds.” Li Bai uses metaphors like “white jade plate” and “the mirror of heavenly realm” to endow the moon with an extraordinary mystery. It represents his boundless yearning and pursuit for beauty, purity, and an ideal world. Centuries later, sculptor Li Chen, through his creative Spiritual Journey through the Great Ether series, presents a wonderland that transcends the mundane, expressing a quest for an ideal state and inner pursuit. Despite the differences in time, form, and medium, Li Chen’s sculptures resonate timeless connection with the poetic imagery of Li Bai. The figures created by Li Chen reflect profound contemplation on ideals and reality, life and the future.
Li Chen’s artistic practice is distinguished by its unique synthesis of Eastern philosophical thought and Western modern artistic forms. His works seamlessly integrate the cultural traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, which reflect and complement each other, forging a distinctive artistic language. This integration is not merely a formal stacking of elements but a contemporary expression of tradition. The lineage of Li Chen’s sculptural creations is like an immense root system, vast and profound. From The Beauty of Emptiness of the early 1990s to Energy of Emptiness, followed by Spiritual Journey through the Great Ether at the dawn of the new millennium, and subsequent series such as Immortality and The Beacon, to works like Ordinary People and Ethereal Cloud after 2010, Li Chen’s artistic creations not only present diversity in form, language, and materials, but also explore the spiritual essence of humanity, nature, and philosophy from a profound perspective.
Li Chen’s works present a unique visual transformation within specific spatial contexts, reflecting the artist’s precise control over sculpture structure while focusing more on the intrinsic “Qi”, “Momentum”, and “Rhythm”. His art conveys a childlike sense of fun and innocence. The Spiritual Journey through the Great Ether series uses minimalist yet dynamic forms and simple, solid materials to interpret Eastern Zen culture, creating a sculptural language in ink-black that is both succinct and unadorned, yet light as air. The human figures seem to float freely in the void, with rounded, substantial bodies, their lines soft yet imbued with a sense of strength.
Heavenly realm, as a mysterious symbol in ancient Chinese culture, represents a transcendent and otherworldly state. In Li Chen’s ink-black sculptures, heavenly realm is not merely an abstract form but a pursuit of an ideal world and a longing to transcend the mundane, yet ideals and reality are not opposing extremes but are interwoven, creating a subtle tension. This tension is at the heart of Li Chen’s artistic language, and it explains the fusion of tradition and modernity, the West and the East. From this, Spiritual Journey through the Mundane World came into being.
In recent years, Li Chen’s work has demonstrated a profound insight into the blurred boundaries between ideals and reality. The Spiritual Journey through the Mundane World series presents a strange sense of balance — an interdependent coexistence of harmony and contradiction between humanity and nature, gods and beasts. This symbiosis is reflected both in the external unity of form and in the release of vitality within the sculptures, such as Pompousness, Omamori, Invisible Thing, and Catching the Wind. These seemingly simple forms are infused with complex symbolic meanings of human nature. “Spiritual Journey through the Mundane World is a contradiction within elegance, and I am deeply immersed in it...” Li Chen said. Therefore, in his works, we witness a nuanced transformation: on one hand, the transcendent “heavenly realm” symbolizes ideals, purity, and transcendence; on the other hand, the return to reality in “mortal world” represents complexity, change, and imperfection. This interplay and tension between the two reveal the intricate relationship between ideals and reality.
