"It’s just a vague idea, perhaps unattainable, but I believe that this is precisely the work of an artist: to work for dreams."
— Li Xinmo
Li Xinmo, an artist from the northernmost region of China, appears quiet but is brimming with inner turmoil and creativity. She firmly believes that an artist’s calling is to work for dreams.
Unlike many of her contemporaries in the Chinese art scene, Li Xinmo boasts a strong background in traditional calligraphy and Chinese painting. She achieved remarkable success in these fields at a young age. However, she soon realized the limitations of traditional artistic expression and began seeking broader and deeper modes of expression. As contemporary art made its way into China, Li Xinmo embarked on a diverse artistic exploration, expanding from traditional easel painting to performance art and installations. An astute observer of the zeitgeist, her creative philosophy is deeply influenced by feminist thought.
In 2012, Li Xinmo co-founded China’s first feminist art collective, “Bald Girls,” with several international artists, focusing on exploring women’s status and identity in society. Boldly incorporating her menstrual blood into her art, she created the series "Women," "Memory of the Vagina," and "Statements of the Scars," delving into the complex relationships between the body, female identity, and societal norms in a candid manner. These works sparked widespread controversy and attention in the art world, and since then, promoting Chinese feminism has become her mission. Creating feminist art is not just an artistic endeavor for her; it is a call for social change.
"Bald Girls" has been exhibited internationally, garnering acclaim and significant academic attention. In these exhibitions, Li Xinmo continuously creates murals, performance art, and installations, showcasing her unique innovation across various art forms. Her murals, from Beijing’s 798 Art District to Bonn and Bogotá, have made a profound impact. Moreover, she skillfully integrates the often-dismissed "woman’s color" pink/magenta into the background of “Bald Girls” posters and catalogues, creating a bold and distinctive avant-garde feminist visual style. This not only became a signature visual element of the exhibitions but also pioneered a unique “Rock Feminist” image in Chinese feminist art, breaking free from the label of docility and mediocrity and stepping onto the world stage.
In 2013, after the "Bald Girls: A Door" exhibition in Beijing, Li Xinmo participated in a brief Artist-In-Residency at the studio of “Fluxus Grandmother” Mary Bauermeister in Germany. During her stay in Germany, she created a series of drawings exploring the unconscious dreamscape and imagination. These works, through both figurative and abstract means, express complex and inexpressible images of life and soul. Created with a ballpoint pen, these images teem with themes of transformation, featuring stories from Greek mythology and strange hybrids from the Chinese Classic of "Mountains and Seas“(Shan Hai Jing).
Many of these images bear distinct female bodily characteristics, resembling otherworldly women or new goddesses, exuding immense energy and power. These works also bear the influence of modernism, evoking the masterpieces of Western literary and artistic figures like Picasso and Kafka. Picasso’s distorted, tension-filled depictions of women and Kafka’s "Metamorphosis" resonate within her works. Li Xinmo’s themes of mutation and alienation reflect the absurdity and common anxieties of human existence from past to present.
With the rise of artificial intelligence technology in 2015, image art encountered unprecedented new possibilities. “Deep Dream” algorithms transformed input images into machine-interpreted dreamlike visuals. This injected new vitality into Li Xinmo’s creations and marked a significant turning point in her artistic journey. From 2015 onwards, she began incorporating AI into her art, embarking on a new artistic dream. She used AI technology to reimagine her past sketches and paintings, endowing these ancient and fantastical goddess images with a high-tech flair.
If the "Women" series, created with menstrual blood, initially presented rebellious feminist art in the 2012 Beijing 798 “Bald Girls” exhibition, then the AI artwork “Daydream” displayed at the 2022 Düsseldorf 10th anniversary exhibition greatly expanded the space for feminist artistic expression. Her sketchbooks, “The Book of Darkness” and the “Green Book” series, served as the prototypes for “Daydream.” These vaguely discernible female elf figures, both mysterious and exotic, fused primitive and contemporary features while boldly imagining future worlds, merging myth with technology. This AI piece not only aimed to reconstruct female power but also sought to create new myths of post-human femininity.
Since 2015, Li Xinmo has collaborated with Roland von der Emden, creating a series of AI artworks and embarking on her AI art career. “Daydream” was featured in the 2018 “Capital@Art·International” exhibition in Frankfurt. During the exhibition preparations, Li Xinmo keenly observed that the world was undergoing a profound social transformation. The old order was collapsing, and a new one was gradually taking shape. Driven by capital, rapid advancements in science and technology, and the swift rise of AI, AI had become a new form of “capital.” Capable of analyzing vast amounts of data accurately and boosting productivity, AI technology became a crucial investment area for enterprises. AI has now become the most significant technological “capital” in multinational corporate competition. It represents not only technological progress but has also become an indispensable asset in the modern economic system.
Moreover, AI is not only a form of “capital” but is also revolutionizing the process and direction of artistic creation. Xinmo’s “Daydream” is a quintessential example of co-creating with AI. During the creation process, the artist consciously collaborated with AI, rather than merely inputting photos for random generation. Through the recreation of hand-drawn works, AI ultimately generated unpredictable images, creating a completely new visual experience. These AI-generated images navigate the space between traditional art painting and high technology, blending “past and future, primitive and technological.” On one hand, they retain the primal expression of human emotional instincts, while on the other, they impart a unique “futuristic” and fantastical quality to the works. Li Xinmo’s attempt to collaborate with AI in her artistic creation significantly broadened her artistic expression’s boundaries, providing artists with entirely new tools and ways of thinking. “Deep Dream” allows past images to orient toward the future, transforming repression and terror into transcendence.
For Li Xinmo, AI can write feminist art, symbolize capital, and create myths, all while being imbued with poetry and dreams. She believes that as AI continues to develop, computers with neural networks will be able to think and perceive like humans. Her work "Daydream" is akin to a poem by Edgar Allan Poe: "All that we see or seem, Is but a dream within a dream." The work transforms dreams into virtual reality, which is gradually merging into our daily lives.
Li Xinmo’s artistic journey is a continuous pursuit of innovation and dreams. From traditional to contemporary, from performance art to AI art, she constantly explores and challenges the boundaries of art. She is well aware that some ideas "may be unattainable, but this is precisely the work of an artist: working for dreams.”
May 24, 2024, Wiesbaden