Li Hanwei

CV

Piero Atchugarry Gallery is pleased to present "Bipolar Disorder," the first solo exhibition in the United States by Li Hanwei (b. 1994 in Xuzhou, Jiangsu, China), curated by Stavroula Coulianidis. The exhibition features five large-scale paintings generated through a combination of artificial intelligence and 3D printing technologies. These works are not merely experiments with "new tools," but rather the artist's profound inquiry into the logic of painting, power structures, and cultural psychology in the digital age.

In the era of AI, painting has become raw visual data. Tens of thousands of artists' works are embedded within neural networks, and this heavy weight of art history is compressed into a thin screen container. New images are constantly generated, replicated, and recombined within databases, and creation gradually shifts from independent manual labor to an algorithm-driven "loop." Li Hanwei's work pushes this logic to the extreme: he manipulates over a dozen 3D printers, repeatedly outputting AI-generated images. Through multiple transfers, layers, destruction, and repair, he wears away the "perfect" computational traces into material images with cracks and imperfections.

Under this process, painting becomes a contradictory existence. While it appears cold and mechanical on the surface, it carries an underlying emotional tension: a manic pursuit of efficiency, repetition, and proliferation, yet also revealing a depressive fatigue in its constant failures and restarts. The artist uses this to expose a familiar psychological structure—in the online world, what we see is not stable expression, but a collective performance. Each iteration of emotion devours certainty, ultimately leaving only distortion, deformation, and emptiness.

This process evokes a certain cultural "inertial logic": when technology becomes the legitimate reason for change, people often use the "new" to negate the "old," replacing experience and detail with quantity and speed. Li Hanwei keenly transplants this logic onto painting—using machines to simulate brushstrokes, algorithms to compress history, and loops to dissolve originality. In this process, painting is "reinvented," but it also exposes a deeper danger: humanity's dependence on tools is no longer a simple extension, but is gradually evolving into the dissolution of the self.

In "Bipolar Disorder," painting is no longer a calm representation but a pathological experience. It is manic with the overproduction of machines and depressed by the loss of meaning. Through this clinical-like observation, Li Hanwei reveals a phenomenon occurring globally: driven by technology and platform logic, human creativity and emotions are amplified, compressed, and reproduced, ultimately mirroring a new collective psychology. This is both a continuation of painting and an inescapable reflection of our time.