...

Artist's Books / Special Editions

...
Newsletter

Order

Distribution

...

Almond, Darren: All Things Pass

Almond, Darren: Terminus

Almond, Darren / Blechen, Carl: Landscapes

Andreani, Giulia

Appel, Karel

Arnolds, Thomas

Brown, Glenn

Brown, Glenn: And Thus We Existed

Butzer, André

Butzer, André: Exhibitions Galerie Max Hetzler 2003–2022

Chinese Painting from No Name to Abstraction: Collection Ralf Laier

Choi, Cody: Mr. Hard Mix Master. Noblesse Hybridige

Demester, Jeremy

Demester, Jérémy: Fire Walk With Me

Dienst, Rolf-Gunter: Frühe Bilder und Gouachen

Dupuy-Spencer, Celeste: Fire But the Clouds Never Hung So Low Before

Ecker, Bogomir: You’re NeverAlone

Elmgreen and Dragset: After Dark

Elrod, Jeff

Elrod, Jeff: ESP

Fischer, Urs

Förg, Günther

Förg, Günther: Forty Drawings 1993

Förg, Günther: Works from the Friedrichs Collection

Galerie Max Hetzler: Remember Everything

Galerie Max Hetzler: 1994–2003

Gréaud, Loris: Ladi Rogeurs  Sir Loudrage  Glorius Read

Hains, Raymond

Hains, Raymond: Venice

Hatoum, Mona (Kunstmuseum
St. Gallen)

Eric Hattan Works. Werke Œuvres 1979–2015

Hattan, Eric: Niemand ist mehr da

Herrera, Arturo: Series

Herrera, Arturo: Boy and Dwarf

Hilliard, John: Accident and Design

Holyhead, Robert

Horn, Rebecca / Hayden Chisholm: Music for Rebecca Horn's installations

Horn, Rebecca: 10 Werke / 20 Postkarten – 10 Works / 20 Postcards

Huang Rui: Actual Space, Virtual Space

Josephsohn, Hans

Kahrs, Johannes: Down ’n out

Koons, Jeff

Kowski, Uwe: Paintings and Watercolors

La mia ceramica

Larner, Liz

Li Nu: Peace Piece

Mahn, Inge

Marepe

Mikhailov, Boris: Temptation of Life

Mosebach, Martin / Rebecca Horn: Das Lamm (The Lamb)

Neto, Ernesto: From Sebastian to Olivia

Niemann, Christoph

Oehlen, Albert: Luckenwalde

Oehlen, Albert: Mirror Paintings

Oehlen, Albert: Spiegelbilder. Mirror Paintings 1982–1990

Oehlen, Albert: Interieurs

Oehlen, Albert: unverständliche braune Bilder

Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman

Oehlen, Albert | Schnabel, Julian

Phillips, Richard: Early Works on Paper

Prince, Richard: Super Group

Reyle, Anselm: After Forever

Riley, Bridget

Riley, Bridget: Circles and Discs

Riley, Bridget: Paintings and Related Works 1983–2010

Riley, Bridget: The Stripe Paintings

Riley, Bridget: Paintings 1984–2020

Roth, Dieter & Iannone, Dorothy

Sammlung im Wandel: Die Sammlung Rudolf und Ute Scharpff

True Stories: A Show Related to an Era – The Eighties

Tunga: Laminated Souls

Tursic, Ida & Mille, Wilfried

de Waal, Edmund: Irrkunst

Wang, Jiajia: Elegant, Circular, Timeless

Warren, Rebecca

Wool, Christopher: Westtexaspsychosculpture

Wool, Christopher: Road

Wool, Christopher: Yard

Wool, Christopher: Swamp

Wool, Christopher: Bad Rabbit

Zeng Fanzhi: Old and New. Paintings 1988–2023

Zhang Wei (2017)

Zhang Wei (2019)

Zhang Wei / Wang Luyan: A Conversation with Jia Wei

...

Out of print

Contact

Legal notice / Privacy policy

 

 

Li Nu: Peace Piece
Texts Yao Siqing, Lu Mingjun


English / Chinese
Hardcover
21 x 28.5 cm
124 pages

40 and 39 b/w illustrations
978-3-947127-34-4
40.00 Euro

 

Leaf through the book

 

Based on his extensive solo exhibition at SPURS Gallery 2021, this book presents the work of Chinese artist Li Nu in all its scope, with pieces created between 2008 and today. Born in 1979, the artist returned to Beijing after graduating from London’s Royal Academy of Art and became one of the most important artists of his generation, straddling both worlds thematically and in terms of artistic language. His sculptures, installations, and performance videos resolutely intervene in the exhibition or living spaces with subversive wit, combining personal narratives and political reflections into poetic works that even without knowledge of their background story impress in their formal richness.

 

Grammar on the G String
(excerpt from the text by Yao Siqing)


Whether stripping the white plaster from a pillar to emphasize its fusion into a new context or filling Kherlen River water into a fire extinguisher and removing its base to emphasize its dangerousness, Li Nu’s exhibition Peace Piece engages multiple senses in the viewer. Its topics touch on a wide range of social realities, including the Covid-19 pandemic, refugees, ethnic conflict, citizens’ movements, and regional politics. However, while Li Nu references real incidents, he does not use them as creative content: he does not employ a social-survey-style presentation approach, he does not bluntly cite news photos that would spark public memories, nor does he recount private experiences. In these works, the specific details of social incidents are present only as whispered hints. The thoughts and insights touched off by the events are the real core of visual expression …


While society exists objectively, it also exists to a great extent within the self. The self absorbs and ruminates on society. Our perceptions, concepts, and preferences take part in the process of producing the world, not to mention the actions and behaviors that arise from it. As Li Nu’s works explore the relationships between the ego, the self, and society, he focuses his questioning awareness on “the influence and interference of social means of shaping on the state of the individual spirit, and further on the discussion of the relationship of contention between self-shaping and social shaping.” The self, however, remains invisible, and yet in Li Nu’s artistic grammar, the “self” often becomes manifest as the living body that appears always in a process of interaction with external circumstances, always in a state of engagement between mind and body. It has perception, cognition, and the ability to act; it is not a cold, static shell, nor a wholly passive puppet. Perhaps only such a living body is able to reveal the freedom of the human spirit within.


The body can be found at every turn in this exhibition. Migration and There Is No End to the Whip (both 2019) present the artist in two “all out” performance videos. The copper piece Beat (2021), meanwhile, demonstrates how sculpture itself is an action or, more precisely, action is the only means of sculpture, and sculpture is the direct record and outcome of action. This sculpture was created by striking a metal plate laid over the artist’s spine for hours, a process that can be witnessed in an accompanying video piece of the same title. Born without Color (2021) is made from copper and aluminum forms joined together in a shape replicating the artist’s lower back when walking, marked across with the word “local.” Flow’er (2021) features a cast of the artist’s arm reaching out from a form that resembles a flattened yellow umbrella. The splitting of the word “flower” also suggests somebody in the act of flowing. The tattered aluminum body behind the umbrellas in Queen’s R (2021) was likewise made as a cast. Li Nu consciously opposed the state of stillness that is usually required by the process and moved around as he pleased, leading the cast to crack and fall off. Fissure (2021) is the cast of a skinned goat hung from an iron hook, the borderline of its broken spine, its form reminiscent of the China–Mongolia border, defining the state of the body. Li Nu views regional borders as molds that shape spiritual awareness. The walkable sculpture Level Land (2021) requires the physical intervention of the viewer to complete its meaning—note that Li Nu’s emphasis is not on “interaction” but on “completion.” Even the wheelchair in the work Air on the G String (2021) at the entrance to the exhibition space indicates the acting, absent body. In Li Nu’s art, the world and the self are in an endless process of mutual shaping and close combat. These pieces of “the body” scattered around the exhibition space denote the fragmentation of the individual spirit under social pressures, while also manifesting with some positivity that the individual spirit has never lacked freedom of action.

 

In collaboration with SPURS Gallery