Li Hei Di’s “the year of mud” at Pace New York: Myth, the Body and a Painter on the Rise

In one of China’s oldest creation stories, the goddess Nüwa makes humanity by dipping a rope into muddy water and flinging it, each falling droplet becoming a person. Li Hei Di has taken that image — the human being as a splash of mud looking for a shape — as the key to a new body of work. Li Hei Di: the year of mud at Pace Gallery, New York runs from 6 November to 19 December 2026 at 540 West 25th Street, and it is one of the most anticipated painting debuts of the Chelsea season.

A fast trajectory, carefully built

Li Hei Di was born in Shenyang, in north-east China, in 1997, and now lives and works in London. The route there was international from the start: a student exchange year in Ohio, then Idyllwild Arts in California, a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts in 2020 and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2022. Solo shows followed quickly — Tits at Dawn at Linseed Projects in Shanghai (2022), Oscillating Womb at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles (2023), 700 Nights of Winter at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London (2024) — and in 2024 Li joined Pace. Tongues of Flare at Pace Hong Kong in 2025 travelled to Pond Society in Shanghai.

Institutional interest has kept pace with the market. Li’s work is held by LACMA, the High Museum of Art, ICA Miami, the Long Museum, The Hepworth Wakefield, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the Columbus Museum of Art and the Shah Garg Foundation. For a painter still in their twenties, that list is remarkable. the year of mud is Li’s first solo exhibition with Pace in New York.

Between a figure and a fog

Li’s paintings live in the zone where a body is about to appear — or about to dissolve. Forms emerge from a shimmering, saturated palette, recede, and reassemble somewhere else on the canvas. Nothing is fixed: limbs may become landscape, a face may turn into weather. Pace describes the new works as oneiric and effervescent, and the artist frames life itself as continual transformation, a negotiation between what is felt inside and what happens outside.

That is where Nüwa’s mud becomes useful. If each person begins as a droplet of earth and water, the body is not a finished object but a vessel still finding its form — one that carries memory, emotion and desire. Li sets this against a series of paired ideas: signifier and signified, soul and form, home and body, lack and desire. Rather than resolving them, the paintings hold them in suspension.

A year of reckoning

The exhibition’s title points to something personal. According to Pace, the paintings record a year of reckoning, and Li describes them as having carried the artist through a “chaotic time of reemergence.” What is striking is the refusal to treat that turbulence as pure loss. Fragmentation becomes a condition of change; beauty and suffering, tenderness and force, vulnerability and resilience sit together in the same picture. The only work named so far, a kiss from the butterfly (2026), already suggests the tone: delicate, sensual and slightly unstable.

The installation as a journey

Pace says the works will be presented in a mediated viewing environment, with the installation conceived as an ongoing process of discovery. In other words, the relationships between the paintings are meant to unfold as visitors move through the rooms, rather than being read from one fixed point. It is a fitting choice for paintings that are themselves about forms in motion. After the show, Pace Publishing will release a monograph tracing Li’s recent development, with a new essay by Tyler Blackwell, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville.

Pace in Chelsea, November 2026

Pace’s flagship on West 25th Street is one of the largest gallery buildings in New York, and November is a heavyweight month there: Lucas Samaras and Elmgreen & Dragset open the same week, while a Rothko/Gottlieb exhibition follows at Pace’s Tribeca space. Giving a young painter a solo slot in that company is a statement of confidence.

Why it matters

• For collectors: a rare chance to see a full new body of work by an artist with major museum holdings and fast-rising demand, in their first New York solo show with a mega-gallery.
• For painters: a study in how colour and soft edges can carry a figure without ever pinning it down.
• For viewers interested in myth: a contemporary reading of an ancient Chinese creation story, translated into the language of Western painting.

Visiting information

Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York. 6 November – 19 December 2026; opening reception Thursday 5 November, 6–8pm. Open Tuesday–Saturday 10am–6pm, closed Sunday and Monday. Phone +1 212 421 3292, [email protected]. See Pace’s official exhibition page, our the year of mud listing, and Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries for more openings.