Asia Art Center is honored to present Li Chen: Bewilderment and Enigma—A Subversive Sophistry of Humanity, on view from October 18, 2025, to February 8, 2026. The exhibition features the artist's Ordinary People series, developed between 2012 and 2017 and including numerous works never exhibited before, together with the newly created Celestial Manuscripts series of 2025. The title Bewilderment and Enigma derives from the juxtaposition of these two bodies of work: the former revisits pivotal moments in Li Chen's creative trajectory, returning after the 2023 series Spiritual Journey through the Mundane World to re-examine the essence of the Ordinary People series, while the latter destabilizes the boundaries between writing and painting with indecipherable symbols. Presented across Galleries A and C at Asia Art Center (Taipei), the two series intersect to form a contemporary debate at once aesthetic and social.
The Ordinary People series plays a crucial role in Li Chen's art, with its conceptual roots traceable to his 1999 debut solo exhibition and the work Butterfly Kingdom. In that piece, an exaggerated figure and multiplicity of hand gestures embodied an underlying social critique, becoming foundational to his artistic vocabulary. In contrast to the ongoing Spiritual Journey through the Great Ether series, ink-black sculptures of monumental levity conceived as a path “in search of spiritual space,” the Ordinary People works employ cracked clay and childlike bodies to construct weighty and profound allegories of humanity. Through firing, pounding, and patching, the fissures of clay accrue over time as inscriptions of existence. Li Chen once described the ineffable power of soil, which is silent yet enduring, nourishing all life, without distinction. He recalls, “In the past, when working with clay, I thought it should be given more value, but I couldn't find a reason to keep it alive in the progress until the Ordinary People series was born.” Here, clay is granted new vitality in art, narrating life itself as a solitary journey. The series of works reveals obsession, indifference, verbal violence, and distorted intimacy, compelling viewers to confront the weight of human nature. This exhibition presents several works from 2012 never before shown to the public, resonating with the “paradox in elegance” in his more recent the Mundane World series, underscoring the deep significance of the Ordinary People series within Li Chen's practice.
The newly conceived Celestial Manuscripts series opens an alternative line of inquiry. Li Chen extracts the gestures of cursive script from semantic meaning, generating abstract images that appear like written characters yet remain indecipherable, resembling alien text. These works preserve the fluid dynamism of calligraphy but, akin to arcane formulas or incantations, reject established linguistic orders, stripping words of their function and transforming them into pure symbols and forms. He observes that when Chinese characters broke from pictographic origins, they already carried the seeds of abstraction. Over centuries, through inscription, brush and ink, poetry, and canonical copybooks, writing has transcended function to reach an apex of aesthetic spirit. Yet he reflects: “But what if I do not follow the rules of writing? Then everything returns to the primordial abstraction of Eastern signs, felt only in the freedom of brush and rhythm, and the joy of emotion within consciousness!” For him, textual meaning no longer matters; his images are “not words, not recognizable, not interpretable.” Writing mutates into phenomena, producing an illusory instability like signals or codes that place viewers in a state of indecipherability. In an era saturated with information, where oral and AI-generated texts are quotidian, the Celestial Manuscripts series allegorizes the collapse of communicable language, the failure of thought, and the rebellion of symbols. It unfolds an alternative dialectic of seeing and reading.
Li Chen: Bewilderment and Enigma—A Subversive Sophistry of Humanity ultimately points to how the artist confronts the weight of human nature and the questions of form through art. The return of the Ordinary People series allows clay-born allegories to converse anew with today's viewers, reminding us that desire and contradiction have never receded. Meanwhile, the Celestial Manuscripts series initiates a renewed exploration of language and signs, drawing writing into abstraction and exposing the absurdities embedded in its form. By bringing these two series together, the exhibition is both a retrospective reflection and a probing of new directions. Li Chen thus stages a dialogue in which past and present, the legible and the illegible, converge in a confrontation as charged as a struggle between the human and the cosmic.
