Profile | Pi Li, head of art at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong, on studying fine arts in Beijing, taking a film to the Cannes festival, and becoming ‘a Hongkonger’
- Tai Kwun’s head of art tells Kate Whitehead about inheriting his father’s love for modern art and pursuing his passion from Beijing to Glasgow and Hong Kong
- He talks about studying at Beijing’s CAFA fine arts academy, walking the red carpet at Cannes, and helping get ‘world class’ M+ in Hong Kong up and running
My father was a worker through the Cultural Revolution and when it ended, he went to the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 40. He stayed on at the academy and became a professor and was among the first critics of avant-garde art in China. My mother was a doctor.
I was born in Wuhan in 1974 and was an only child. Wuhan is surrounded by mountains and is one of the hottest places in China. As a child, in the summer, we slept outside on the street on a bamboo bed. It was fun. When air conditioning came everything changed.
Reading with his ears
In the 1980s, after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform policy, there was a new art movement and it was a boom time. My father was part of that.
As a child, I wasn’t so into sport and spent most of my time with my father, reading. It was a typical university professor’s family environment. My father opened his bookshelf to me, and I read a lot as a child – literature, history, art books and magazines.
Reading is one thing, but your ear can also read – I overheard conversations and gathered information. My father’s studio was in our home. Many people gathered there, and I always listened. It invoked my ambition to study art history, the same as my father.
Honour and privilege
When I was 18, I left Wuhan for the first time and went to Beijing to study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). It was a privileged education. At the time, the academy only accepted 40 to 50 applicants from all over China and only nine people in the Art History Department.
