Artist honors Dongguan and its migrant workers through artwork

Li Jinghu, 53, a native artist of Dongguan, South China's Guangdong province, has spent over 20 years creating art that honors his home city and the hundreds of millions of migrant workers who have earned Dongguan the title of the "world's factory."

Li's ongoing retrospective exhibition at the X Museum in Beijing, titled I Am Here! A Witness of a City and 200 Million People, features 19 installations created between 2009 and 2025, all made of quotidian materials and industrial readymades sourced directly from Dongguan.

One example is White Clouds (2009), a cloud-like installation in the museum lobby made from a group of white fluorescent tubes, typically used to illuminate assembly lines in Dongguan. Similarly, the artist transformed 10 smartphone screens, vertically aligned together and each playing a video of a gushing faucet, into Waterfall (2015), a majestic piece evocative of a real waterfall in nature.