Li Hei Di: the year of mud

the year of mud presents new paintings by the London-based artist Li Hei Di at Pace's 540 West 25th Street gallery. It is Li's first solo exhibition with Pace in New York since joining the gallery in 2024, and it places their dreamlike, effervescent compositions within a carefully mediated viewing environment. Poised between figuration and abstraction, Li's paintings occupy a space where certainty starts to dissolve. The artist understands life as a continual act of transformation, an endless negotiation between inner experience and outer reality. Their figures are never fixed: they keep shifting between states of becoming, so that the body acts less as a stable form than as a vessel through which memory, emotion, and desire flow. Painted in a rich, almost shimmering palette, the compositions disclose themselves slowly, as forms rise to the surface, recede, and change. The new paintings record a year of reckoning. "I kept thinking about the Chinese goddess Nüwa, who is believed to have created humans," Li explains. "She dipped a rope into muddy water and swung the muddy cord through the air. The flying drops of mud turned into common people as they hit the ground. As I transformed throughout the past year, I kept picturing my body, a droplet of mud, flying through midair and dipping back into the fertile mud of possibility. There, I saw many shapes. I moved through them, searching for one I could inhabit, shedding the coat I was given, watching myself in the realm of chaos and hope, my body bouncing between the signified and the signifier, the soul and the form, the home and the body, lack and desire. Slowly, as I waited, I made this body of work. These paintings became more than a documentation of my transition: they were giant listeners. They stretched wide and held me in this chaotic time of reemergence." The resulting works are both deeply personal and broadly human. They reward close looking while also enveloping the viewer in all-encompassing, dreamlike atmospheres in which fragmentation becomes a condition of transformation rather than of loss. Holding beauty and suffering in the same breath, the paintings sustain a fragile tension in which tenderness and force, vulnerability and resilience, cannot be pulled apart—not as opposing conditions, but as experiences through which each is felt more deeply. In keeping with the spirit of the work, the exhibition is conceived as an ongoing process of discovery, with different paintings and relationships revealing themselves as visitors move through the space. Following the show, Pace Publishing will release a new monograph tracing the recent development of Li's practice and documenting the exhibition, with a new text by Tyler Blackwell, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Li Hei Di lives and works in London. After a one-year student exchange in Ohio, they studied at Idyllwild Arts in southern California, then earned a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2020 and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2022. Their first solo exhibition took place at Linseed Projects, Shanghai (2022), followed by shows at Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2023), and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2024). Tongues of Flare (2025), at Pace Gallery in Hong Kong, was their first solo exhibition with the gallery.