Li Hanwei

CV

Li Hanwei: Just Drill It

Opening            2024 March 31 17：00 – 20：30

Open from.       2024 March 31 to May 26

Location            HOW Museum, 3F, Exhibition Hall 2

HOW Art Museum is pleased to announce that “Just Drill It”, solo exhibition of Li Hanwei, will be on view from March 31, 2024. Li Hanwei views technology as a new medium of creation, seeking to demonstrate and evaluate how it intervenes or even dominates our perception, communication, and identity construction, thereby sparking profound reflections on individual autonomy and cultural diversity in a technocratic society.



"Just Drill It" utilizes modern technologies such as cloud computing and 3D printing to challenge the cultural inertia in the context of information overload and technological dependency, revealing the blurred position of individuals in the intersection of virtuality and reality, while also questioning the modern society's excessive dependence on technology. Against this backdrop, the exhibition title serves as a slogan, aiming to encourage us to resist the modern lifestyle that turns people into passive receivers and to call for active participation in the creation of culture and the mobilization of technological media. It demands that we must never surrender our individual subjective initiative and refuse to let technology completely dictate our lives and values.



"The flow and transformation of information as the carrier of culture has always been a subject of sustained interest and focus for me. The practicality of tools, the evolution of technology, and the manipulative power of content are all inspirations and starting points for my practice. These three elements are interconnected and transform one another. I have often attempted to work on

 materials in the real world but ended up finding it inefficient, and this 'inefficiency' causes me deep unease. In contrast, I prefer to manipulate the immaterial because it is always real-time and reversible. I am grateful for the tool systems of game production and after-effects for advertisement, as well as the comprehensive supply chain system in China, which makes such a way of working possible.



Overall, this exhibition is the result of my reflections on image dissemination. My phone stores a massive amount of images, whether taken by myself or not, whether related to me or not. The enormous amount of time spent on the internet every day makes me unusually clear about things I have never seen: through feeds from big data, information always presents us with filtered facts. They provide us with a certain sort of guidance which tends to be superficial phenomena. I feel the urge to depict the original appearance of images—as carriers of information.



Practice adopts common forms of displaying the virtual world—screens and wallpapers. Its unique sense of form allows me to focus entirely on the virtual space. I start with the most basic brushstrokes in reality using a brush and fingers or even directly capture strokes from others, then photograph them and continue to build them up in Cinema 4D. In this process, I quickly and unconsciously complete each image, go back, modify, and save the results I'm satisfied with. I am trying to expand on the existing framework of painting methodology—here, the original body posture of painting is replaced by the mere wrist movement of controlling a mouse, for example, by repeatedly drawing textures in the software to evolve the content of the image, or by using the 'camera system' to present the spatial sense of painting—and the logic of viewing—3D software interfaces help us overcome the limitations of the naked eye.



Likewise, Witness regards 3D printers's instrumentality logic as a source of formality. The size restrictions of the printer require printing to be completed within a limited cube, which forces a modular effect. Using the depth camera function of the phone, I first displace and extrude each pixel of the image to create a virtual thickness. Once confirmed, the model is sent to the 3D printing farm for batch printing, which produces a geological visual effect on the image, with each layer recording the information location of the pixels. Throughout the process, I have been remotely transmitting recorded data in real-time through the app, controlling the texture, lines of the print, and even retaining accidental defects.”   

——Li Hanwei