Asia Art Center is honored to announce our collaboration with Gana Art in presenting Li Chen: A New Eastern Spirit—Genuine and Otherworldly, the first solo exhibition in Korea by Li Chen, an internationally active Taiwanese contemporary sculptor, marking a significant milestone for the artist's presentation in Korea. The selected works span from 1999 to 2025, beginning with early works that reveal a critical awareness of society, such as Butterfly Kingdom (1999) and Collective Consciousness (2006), moving from the Energy of Emptiness series to The Beacon and The Mundane World chapters of the Spiritual Journey through the Great Ether series. The exhibition also includes works from the Ordinary People, Ethereal Cloud, and latest Celestial Manuscripts series.
Through the works on view, viewers may trace how Li Chen searches for a spiritual space: entering the realm of the mind through his ink-black sculptures of monumental levity; carrying the weight of worldly reality in the clay of Ordinary People; and further probing, through The Mundane World, the paradox in elegance hidden within human nature. In Ethereal Cloud, the works can be viewed from four directions, revealing the "cloud" as a fluid matter that manifests its unrestrained qualities in distinct forms. Celestial Manuscripts, meanwhile, draws upon the forms of cursive script to detach writing from semantic meaning, returning it to the subtle dialectic between viewing and reading.
Li Chen's works possess a visual and spatial aura of their own. Their postures are free, always speaking slowly from within silence. Within the weight of bronze and clay lies the lightest soul; between rounded and silent forms surges the purest dynamic force of life. Lightness and weight, void and substance, withdrawal from the world and engagement with it, the physical form and the inner mind—these are never opposing forces in his practice. Instead, they permeate and coexist with one another, generating a new Eastern artistic language that resists any single definition.
What makes Li Chen exceptional is that, while deeply rooted in the East, he has never been confined by the paradigms of millennia-old tradition, nor has he simply transplanted Western forms. Rather, from the deep structures of zen, Daoism, and Eastern classics, he gives rise to a new classic for the contemporary age. Taking qi as his guide, he transforms sculpture from the mere shaping of form into a field where energy, inner nature, and states of existence converge. His sculptures may appear solid and grounded, yet they seem to float with the fullness of drifting clouds; his innocent clay figures may appear simple and unadorned, yet they point directly to the absurdities and obsessions buried deep within the human heart. It is precisely through this transformation within his ink-black sculptures of monumental levity that Li Chen opens an otherworldly path distinct from the currents of his time.
Founded in Seoul in 1983, Gana Art is one of Korea's leading galleries for modern and contemporary art. Over the past four decades, it has established a strong reputation as one of the country's most influential art institutions, presenting exhibitions that span a wide range of artists, practices, and genres.
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Li Chen: A New Eastern Spirit—Genuine and Otherworldly
Dates: 10.15-11.22, 2026
Reception: 4:00p.m. 10.15, 2026
Venue: Gana Art Center (28, Pyeongchang 30-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea)
