Interview: Li Hanwei on Fiction, Faith, and the Fragility of Images

24/05/2025

by NOCTURA Magazine

NOCTURA: Your work often resembles advertisements from an alternate future. Why do you use commercial aesthetics to speak about culture and belief?

Li Hanwei: Advertisement is the most effective form of fiction today. It's not just about selling a product—it sells a mood, a belief, a lifestyle. In a way, it works like ancient mythology. Liquid Health is my way of using this persuasive language to explore Chinese spirituality and nationalism as commodities. When you wrap something sacred in a slick, glossy video, you ask: is it still sacred, or has it become just another product?

NOCTURA: In Liquid Health, you create a fictional government wellness brand. Where did that idea come from?

Li: I imagined what traditional Chinese medicine or Taoist aesthetics would look like if fully absorbed into state capitalism. So I invented “Liquid Health”—a state-run brand that grows porcelain from soil, launches fridges into space, and sells dragon-scale beauty masks. It’s absurd, but also a mirror. Fiction allows me to exaggerate until the truth becomes more visible.

NOCTURA: In your show New Painting, you scanned brushstrokes digitally and stretched them into surreal 3D textures. Were you trying to break the painting?

Li: Not to break it, but to question its authority. Painting has always been this untouchable medium in art history. But when I started working with CGI, I realized a brushstroke is just a texture, like skin. You can scan it, stretch it, melt it. The “painting” becomes a kind of ghost—present but disembodied.

NOCTURA: Your generation of artists is sometimes called “post-internet.” Do you identify with that?

Li: The term feels outdated. We’re not post-internet—we live inside the internet. It’s not a theme; it’s an environment. I’m more interested in how images behave today: how they mutate, collapse, reappear. My work is about the fragility of images and the systems that try to control them.

NOCTURA: What do you hope people feel when they enter your installations?

Li: Ideally, discomfort and curiosity. I want viewers to feel like they’re watching something that is both beautiful and dangerous, familiar yet artificial. Like a dream that’s too sharp. A surface that’s too clean to be trusted.