Li Yong Xiang

    BIOGRAPHY

    Li Yong Xiang (b. 1991, Changsha) is a Berlin-based artist. In 2020, Li completed Meisterschüler at Städelschule, Frankfurt. He received the Prize of the Rainer Wild Art Foundation in 2023, and was nominated the eighth Huayu Youth Award in 2020.

    In his practice, Li Yong Xiang draws on a diversity of media. His main interest, however, lies in the border-crossing intersections between painting, sculpture, music and video. Influenced by a reciprocal understanding of culture and diaspora experience, the artist challenges ideas of sovereignty and existing power-structures by engaging in contaminations that aim at media, formal and cultural specificities.

    Recent solo & duo exhibitions: In Rust, Antenna Space, Shanghai, CN (2025); Of Strangers, Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin, Germany (2024); Mannered in a sleeve, Deborah Schamoni, Munich, Germany (2023); Paris+ par Art Basel – Yong Xiang Li: 8 Chairs (Adolescent Fabrications), solo presentation with Antenna Space, Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris, France (2022); Inside Job, LC Queisser, Tbilisi, Georgia (2022); Late, Futura, Prague, Czech Republic (2021); Superfluous, Schwabinggrad, Munich, Germany (2021); Curl, Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna, Austria (2020); Companion, Jean Claude Maier, Frankfurt, Germany (2019) among others.

    Selected group exhibitions: 14th Mercosul Biennial: Estalo, Fundacao Ibere Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2025); The Utopia of Rules, 72-13, Singapore (2025); Horizons: Is there anybody out there?, curated by Robin Peckham, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2023); Biennale für Freiburg, Kunstverein Freiburg, Museum Für Neue Kunst and various sites, Freiburg, Germany (2023); Painting Unsettled, UCCA Edge, Shanghai, China (2023); Identity Not Proved: New Acquisitions of the Federal Collection, Bundes Kunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2022); The View from There, Sadie Coles, London, UK (2021); Indistinct Chatter, Layr, Vienna, Austria (2021); The Eighth Huayu Award Finalist Exhibition 2020: A Long Hello, UCCA, Beijing, China (2020); Breathing through Skin, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2020); L’esprit, Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (2020); The Deficit Faction, Long March Project, Beijing, China (2019); Ford Every Streams, Galleria Acappella, Naples, Italy (2019); Fruit Suspended and Swaying, Aedt, Düsseldorf, Germany (2019); Double Trouble, Root Canal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2019); Appearing Unannounced, painnale 2018, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2018); Radio Ufff! at fffriedrich, Frankfurt, Germany (2018); Back to Them, Gärtnergasse, Vienna, Austria (2018) among others.

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    • Art-Ba-Ba｜李泳翔“锈色”：一场地理与创作的双重“黑色旅行” | Sun Jialing

      (Chinese version only)

      25-9-2025

      The editor mainly discusses Li Yong Xiang’s Rust  exhibition, which reinterprets colonial-era religious murals through contemporary painting-sculpture hybrids and immersive sound installations. By transforming the gallery into a pseudo-sacred space with stained-glass effects and Georgian polyphonic soundscapes, Li critiques historical narratives and art’s political roles. The analysis highlights how Li deconstructs Orthodox imagery and employs ‘quotation’ to question memory’s reliability, particularly through his reworking of Mikhail Nesterov’s controversial murals. The show balances refined aesthetics with raw materiality, reflecting Georgia’s cultural duality while exposing history’s artificial construction. Ultimately, it presents a sophisticated meditation on how both art and collective memory are curated fictions.

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    • Ocula｜Cosmopolitan Orthodoxy: Li Yong Xiang on His Larger-than-Life Tableaux | Zian chen

      2025-4-17

      Following the exhibition’s opening, Li sat down with Ocula to discuss his time in Georgia, where he visited one of Nesterov’s murals, as well as the intersection of his painting practice with sound and other performative mediums. The conversation reflects on themes of identity, alienation, and the artist’s evolving sense of home.

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    • Rhinoceroses, Lilies, Vampires: Yong Xiang Li | Alvin Li

       
      Central to Li’s work is his interest in the evolution of style and subjectivity as mediated by power dynamics across racial, sexual, class, and national boundaries. From the eighteenth century through the twentieth—while queer signs like the mannerisms of the by-then-obsolete European aristocracy were being adopted by cosmopolitan homosexuals in dis-identification with the increasingly dominant and normative social body of the bourgeoisie—growing exchange between East and West spawned fantasies permeated by fear of the foreign, resulting in Europe’s assimilation of other bodies, desires, and aesthetic traditions into its own canon.

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