Lihong Bai’s intermedia practice explores live performance, performance films, sound and installation, as well as ink performance paintings and painting. Bai tests the Self’s internal and external spaces and the body’s limits. Recent performances employ interventions inside and outside the gallery, as well as inside and outside urban and rural institutional, architectural and cultural ecologies. In so doing, she explores not only the Self’s spaces and boundaries, but also power structure’s spatial confluence, in relation to institutional order, personal freedom, and personal-societal individuation. For instance, the camera and drone film footage of Outsider (2026) indirectly discourse surveillance, through interventions in Ordos’ institutional spaces, and London’s public transit’s monitored spaces.
Before receiving her MA at the Royal Academy of Art, Bai trained in Chinese landscape painting. Bai reenvisions Shan Shui, “not as a natural idyll, but as a contemporary spatial condition - a landscape of transit systems, borders, migration, capital and surveillance.” Movement was innate to her nomadic sheep/goat herding ancestry, where environmental conditions and bodily impacts were ever shifting. “Rather than seeking permanence, her practice explores how identities are continuously reshaped through movement and becoming.” In Outsider, rather than an idyllic return, home becomes a Foucauldian heterotopia, a diasporic state betwixt cultures and identity, on the cusp of becoming.
Bai’s work has been presented at the Malta Biennale (2024), Somerset House (2025), the Shanghai International Art Festival (2025), Museums West (2026), and the British Consulate General in Los Angelos (2025), forthcoming exhibition at M+M Gallery, Hong Kong, and Art021 Shanghai (October-December 2026) Her art is held in the collections of Beijing Contemporary Art Museum and the Museum of East Asia Art, Bath.
Source: https://www.lihong.art/bio