In his works, Li Hui creates unreal situations that have a dreamlike quality. In the exhibition room, the visitor is temporarily and randomly surrounded by a cage made of laser beams. Hui uses the cage, which encloses but does not harm the visitor, to explore individual boundaries and demonstrate how people are influenced by purely optical – though physically irrelevant – barriers. Visitors are confronted with both a liminal and a powerful visual aesthetic experience. The installation not only makes the visitor “inside the cage” examine his or her feelings, the “outside” observers, too, can watch the experiment and behavior of “those trapped inside.”

For Li Hui, materials such as acrylic, LED and laser light are the key elements of his installations and sculptures – not because he wants to demonstrate what the technology and the material can do, but to trigger feelings. Though Hui claims to be an apolitical person, his high-tech works criticize the problems of modern industry and the growing materialism of our times. Born in Beijing in 1977, the artist has already had much-noticed solo exhibitions in China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and at the Light Art Museum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. In parallel with the exhibition at the Schering Stiftung, Li Hui’s work is on view as part of the “Car Culture” exhibition at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe.