Li Gang was born in Yunnan, China, in 1986, and currently lives and works in Beijing. In 2009, he enrolled in the Department of Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.Li Gang regards artistic creation as a process of constructing vessels for emotional and spiritual preservation. He seeks to explore the interplay between the language of everyday objects and the language of art, aiming to interpret the essential information and self-expression inherent in the development of things. By doing so, he transforms these elements into unique entities capable of preserving emotion and spirit. Through an intuitive engagement with materials, Li Gang emphasizes the inner spirit and tension rooted in the materiality of objects. His work achieves a balance between form and content, serving as a means to investigate the boundaries between art and perception.

Material | Red clay

“Blood” is a type of ink developed by Li Gang in 2025 using soil.

Color is inherently elusive—what we can grasp are pigments. Pigments are substitutes for color, imitations of its essence. The standardized production of modern pigments has made painting more convenient, but at the same time, it has diluted the emotional purity in artistic expression and stripped pigments of their legitimacy. They have become mere tools for simulating color. In primitive painting, pigments and imagery were unified. The selection and preparation of pigments were directly tied to what was being depicted. For instance, in ancient murals, hunters would mix the blood of their prey with earth to depict scenes of the hunt. In this context, the blood-based pigment became a legitimate medium for expressing the hunter’s emotion. In Blood, Li Gang draws on the concept of the "hunter" to channel the emotional origin of color. By transforming soil from his hometown into pigment, he reclaims the legitimacy of the medium—making the act of painting a sincere extension of personal emotion, and uniting pigment and picture once again.