Pace is pleased to present Tongues of Flare, an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Li Hei Di, at its Hong Kong gallery. On view from May 29 to August 29, this presentation marks Li’s first solo show with Pace since they joined the gallery’s program in 2024. Following its run at Pace in Hong Kong, Tongues of Flarewill travel to the Pond Society during Shanghai Art Week in the fall.

Born in Shenyang, China in 1997, Li, who currently lives and works in London, is known for their explorations of human embodiment, displacement, and intimacy in luminous paintings that blend abstraction and figuration. In their vibrant, dreamlike canvases—where ghostly, translucent bodies and body parts pulsate in and out of view amid abstract forms and washes of color—Li embeds latent narratives about gender, repressed and fulfilled desire, and emotional fluidity for viewers to uncover and decipher. Primarily a painter, they also work across sculpture and performance, mediums that complement their otherworldly canvases.

Li’s work has figured in recent group exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield in the United Kingdom, The Warehouse in Dallas, Le Consortium in Dijon, France, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and Marquez Art Projects in Miami, as well as the 2023 X Museum Triennial in Beijing. They are represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio; the Hepworth Wakefield; the Long Museum in Shanghai; and the Yageo Foundation in Taiwan.

The artist’s exhibition at Pace in Hong Kong will spotlight 11 new, never-before-exhibited paintings produced in 2025. Meditating on self-discovery and enactments of physical and spiritual transformation, these works imagine the body as an architecture of energies and feelings—a space where chaos, love, passion, and other phenomena converge and collide. These layered compositions, where spectral figures reveal and obscure themselves at different moments, speak to the complexities of selfhood and the conflicts between our internal selves and forces of the external world.

In this group of paintings, the most vulnerable and diaristic works that Li has created to date, the artist continues to use the natural world—in particular, movements and flows of water—as a metaphor for the evolutionary process of becoming one’s self. Wild abstractions rendered in saturated colors oscillate and undulate across their canvases with an oceanic rhythm, fluctuating with each motion of Li’s brush. As with their past bodies of work, they have also drawn inspiration from various literary sources—including Georges Bataille’s Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby—for their latest paintings. In these books—particularly in The Vegetarian, which tells the story of a woman who becomes increasingly convinced that she is turning into a plant—Li has uncovered new ideas about sexuality, monstrosity, and transfiguration that manifest in their new works. Each painting in this series can be understood as a seed for profound, liberating growth, revealing how change can emerge from the most hidden corners of the self.

A new wood sculpture by the artist will also be on view in the exhibition. Depicting an abstracted body at repose within a cradle-like vessel, this work reflects the state of the physical body and the mind at night during sleep—sinking ever deeper into theshifting, unpredictable world of the unconscious. Presented together in Hong Kong, Li’s paintings and sculpture transport viewers to a realm where the boundaries between life and death, beauty and struggle, and imagination and reality are collapsed.

Venue
Pace Gallery, 12/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road, Central, Hong Kong

Artist
Li Hei Di

Exhibition Dates
May 29 – August 29, 2025

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday | 11 AM – 7 PM

Website
https://www.pacegallery.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/pacegallery/

Contact
hongkong@pacegallery.com

About Artist

Li Hei Di (b. 1997, Shenyang, China) lives and works in London. The artist attended a one-year student exchange program in Ohio before studying at Idyllwild Arts in southern California. They received 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 one-artist exhibition was held at Linseed Projects, Shanghai (2022), followed by Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2023) and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2024). Recent group exhibitions including their work have been held at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong (2023); Centre of International Contemporary Art, Vancouver (2023); X Museum Triennial, Beijing (2023); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2024); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2024); GRIMM, New York (2024); and The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (2025–2026). Their work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Yageo Foundation, Taipei, among others.

About Gallery

Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries, founded by Arne Glimcher in 1960. Holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko, Pace has a unique history that can be traced to its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery continues to nurture its longstanding relationships with its legacy artists and estates while also making an investment in the careers of contemporary artists, including Torkwase Dyson, Loie Hollowell, Robert Nava, Adam Pendleton, and Marina Perez Simão.

Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher and President Samanthe Rubell, Pace has established itself as a collaborative force in the art world, partnering with other galleries and nonprofit organizations around the world in recent years. The gallery advances its mission to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences and collectors around the world through a robust global program anchored by its exhibitions of both 20th century and contemporary art and scholarly projects from its imprint Pace Publishing, which produces books introducing new voices to the art historical canon. This artist-first ethos also extends to public installations, philanthropic events, performances, and other interdisciplinary programming presented by Pace.

Today, Pace has nine locations worldwide, including two galleries in New York—its eight-story headquarters at 540 West 25th Street and an adjacent 8,000-square-foot exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. The gallery’s history in the New York art world dates to 1963, when it opened its first space in the city on East 57th Street. A champion of Light and Space artists, Pace has also been active in California for some 60 years, opening its West Coast flagship in Los Angeles in 2022. It maintains European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where it established an office in 2023 and a gallery space in 2025. Pace was one of the first international galleries to have a major presence in Asia, where it has been active since 2008, the year it first opened in Beijing’s vibrant 798 Art District. It now operates galleries in Hong Kong and Seoul and opened its first gallery in Japan in Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills development in 2024.

(Text and images courtesy of Pace)