Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Li Chen (李真), born in 1963 in Yunlin, is much more than just a sculptor of smiling Buddhas. He is the very embodiment of modern contradiction: a Zen monk in a black kimono behind the wheel of a sports car, an artist who sells his works for exorbitant prices while meditating on emptiness.
Look at his monumental sculptures that float like helium balloons while weighing several hundred kilos. These black lacquered bronze bodies, polished to shine like jade caressed for centuries, are the perfect expression of what Gaston Bachelard called “denied weight”. In his book Air and Dreams, the French philosopher explored humanity’s fascination with flight, with the victory over gravity. Li Chen materializes this ancestral reverie in bronze, creating works that seem to defy the laws of physics while remaining deeply anchored in matter.
Take Floating Heavenly Palace (2007), that figure of a child nonchalantly balancing a golden palace on his index finger. This work is not just a technical feat; it is a meditation on power and its fragility. The child, with his disarming innocence, juggles symbols of authority as if they were toys. It’s Nietzsche in three dimensions, a perfect illustration of what the German philosopher described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra when he evoked the three metamorphoses of the spirit: from camel to lion, then from lion to child. Li Chen’s child embodies this final transformation, the one that allows the creation of new values with the lightness of rediscovered innocence.
But don’t be fooled—his works’ apparent lightness conceals a deep reflection on the contemporary human condition. In his Soul Guardians series (2008), Li Chen tackles our modern relationship with natural disasters and our tendency to seek divine protection in the face of the uncontrollable. His Lord of Wind and Lord of Fire are not mere protective deities but metaphors for our powerlessness against nature’s forces. These imposing figures, both terrifying and absurd, reflect our own smallness before the elements.
What makes Li Chen’s work particularly relevant in our era of climate anxiety is his fusion of Buddhist tradition with an acute awareness of contemporary issues. His Ethereal Cloud series (2011) transforms the traditional representation of clouds into a meditation on air pollution. The stainless steel volutes, reminiscent of traditional Chinese cloud motifs, take on an unsettling dimension when considered through the lens of our environmental reality.
The artist constantly plays on this duality between tradition and modernity, between the sacred and the profane. His generously shaped Buddhas are reminiscent of Fernando Botero’s figures, but whereas the Colombian master celebrates the sensuality of flesh, Li Chen explores the lightness of emptiness. This approach echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought on perception and embodiment. In Eye and Mind, the French philosopher explored how our perception of the world is inseparable from our corporeality. Li Chen’s sculptures perfectly embody this tension between the body as a physical mass and the body as a vehicle for transcendence.
The transformation of his early works, rooted in the tradition of temple statues, into more personal and contemporary creations reflects the trajectory of modern Asian art as a whole. Starting with a craft-based practice of reproducing traditional Buddhas, Li Chen has developed a unique sculptural language that engages with both Western contemporary art and Eastern philosophy.
His The Immortality of Fate series (2011) marks a radical shift in his practice. Abandoning the smooth perfection of lacquered bronze for raw materials like wood and rope, the artist explores the beauty of imperfection, what the Japanese call wabi-sabi. These works, which deliberately expose their fragility and ephemeral nature, are a poignant meditation on mortality and transformation.
Across his various series, from The Beauty of Emptiness (1992-1997) to his more recent works, Li Chen maintains a delicate balance between mass and lightness, between tradition and innovation. His figures seem to float in a liminal space, neither entirely terrestrial nor fully celestial. This spatial ambiguity mirrors our own contemporary condition—suspended between a receding past and an uncertain future.
The evolution of his work towards more abstract and conceptual forms, notably in his Ethereal Cloud series, demonstrates an artistic maturity that transcends easy categorization. These stainless steel sculptures, which seem to capture the very essence of movement, are the culmination of a formal exploration that began with his early Buddhas. They represent a unique synthesis between traditional Chinese calligraphy and Western modern abstraction.
Li Chen’s trajectory is emblematic of the transformations in contemporary Asian art. Starting from a traditional training, he has developed a personal language that engages with global concerns while maintaining a strong cultural identity. His international success, marked by exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and Place Vendôme in Paris, attests to his ability to transcend cultural boundaries while remaining deeply rooted in his tradition.
But what makes his work truly remarkable is that he maintains a spiritual authenticity despite his commercial success. In an often cynical art market, Li Chen continues to create works that invite contemplation and deep reflection. His sculptures are not mere decorative objects but invitations to a meditative experience.
The way he manipulates emptiness is particularly significant. In Taoist tradition, emptiness is not an absence but an active presence, a space of potentiality. Li Chen’s sculptures, despite their imposing mass, seem constantly on the verge of dissolving into the air. This paradoxical quality echoes the Buddhist conception of form and emptiness, where solid appearances are revealed to be as ephemeral as clouds.
His treatment of surfaces is also remarkable. The deep black he uses is not just a color but an absence that absorbs light while reflecting it. This particular quality creates a visual tension that simultaneously attracts and repels the gaze, fostering a contemplative experience reminiscent of Zen meditation exercises.
Li Chen’s latest works show a shift toward greater abstraction while maintaining the meditative quality that defines his art. His recent sculptures seem less concerned with representation and more interested in the pure exploration of form and space. This evolution perhaps reflects a growing confidence in his personal artistic language, freed from the constraints of tradition while remaining faithful to his fundamental principles.
Li Chen’s work reminds us that contemporary art can be both accessible and profound, commercially viable and spiritually authentic. In an increasingly fragmented and anxious world, his sculptures offer a moment of pause—an invitation to contemplation that transcends cultural divisions and aesthetic prejudices. They remind us that true artistic innovation does not lie in rejecting tradition but in transforming it from within to create something truly new.
