Press Release

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. By experimenting with advanced new tools, Li confronts the history of painting, power dynamics between human and machine and impact cultural psychology has in the digital age.   

In the era of AI, images are constantly generated, replicated, and recombined within databases. Creation has shifted from independent manual labor to an algorithm-driven "loop." Li Hanwei's work pushes this notion to the extreme – manipulating over a dozen 3D printers and repeatedly outputting AI-generated images. Through multiple transfers, layers, destruction and repair, he wears away the "perfect" computational traces into material images with all its cracks and imperfections.   

Under this process, painting becomes a contradictory existence. While the works may appear cold and mechanical on the surface, they carry an underlying emotional tension: a manic pursuit of efficiency, repetition and proliferation, yet reveal a depressive fatigue in their constant failures and restarts. The artist uses this method to expose a familiar psychological structure—in the online world, what we see is not a 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 into 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.

The exhibition title, “Bipolar Disorder”, suggests painting is no longer a cognitive experience but rather a pathological one. It is manic due to 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.