Lihong Bai
China
1999
Lihong Bai, born in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China, in 1999, currently lives and works in London. Having received rigorous training in traditional Chinese ink painting for 15 years, she later earned her Master's degree from the Royal College of Art in London. Her interdisciplinary practice spans painting, performance, installation, and spatial intervention, using the body as a medium to test the boundaries between institutional order and instinct.
Bai redefines "Shanshui"—moving beyond its traditional definition as an idealized image of nature—to conceptualize it as a constantly shifting contemporary spatial condition shaped by infrastructure, populations, migration, capital, and institutional power. She conducts performances in public spaces: swallowing dry grass inside a moving Underground carriage or scraping ink across gallery walls, using these actions to probe and unpack how identity is constructed, displaced, and renegotiated within global infrastructures.
Bai has exhibited internationally in cities such as London, New York, Los Angeles, Milan, Beijing, and Shanghai. In 2027, her work will be presented in the reopening group exhibition at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. Other recent group exhibitions include Flower World (Museum of East Asian Art, Bath, UK, 2025), Weeds (British Consulate-General Los Angeles, Los Angeles, 2025), Fictitious Trade: Duplicating Stories without Bartering (Shanghai International Arts Festival, Shanghai, 2025), Flowers of Time (Museum of Contemporary Art Beijing, Beijing, 2024), and the 1st Malta Biennale (2024). Her work is included in institutional collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Beijing (MOCAB) and the Museum of East Asian Art, Bath (MEAA).
