Li Hongwei (b.1980) is a contemporary artist. He works and lives in Beijing and New York. His works have been acquired by The British Museum, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Israel Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Philadelphia Museum of Art. His works have been exhibited in a number of international art institutions, including the National Art Museum of China, The US Embassy, The New Mexico Museum of Art, The Fox Art Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Dublin Castle, Ireland.
Li Hongwei is celebrated in China and here in the US as well as internationally. Li is known for his artistic, conceptual and technical fusion of the past and present in innovative work with classical Chinese ceramics and the tenets of western modernism-postmodernism. He established an astonishing approach to contemporary sculpture with his Upwelling Gravity series. Tao Wang Curator of Chinese Art at the Chicago Art Institute speaks to this series as a remarkable meditational allegory of balance achieved in harmony with great skill creating polished steel and ceramic sculpture that has never been done before.
Hongwei holds a bachelor’s degree in sculpture from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and a Master of Fine Arts degree in ceramic art, 2007, from the New York State College of Ceramics at the Alfred University, Alfred, NY.
The primary mission of Alfred Ceramic Art Museum is to collect, preserve, conserve, research, interpret and exhibit ceramic art for aesthetic and educational purposes.
The museum is a research and teaching facility, which offers an engagement in cultural history via ceramic art to the student, artist, scholar and collector as well as the local, national and international community.