Heaven Green is a solo exhibition of wall-based and sculptural works that examines urbanisation, lifestyle, and aspiration through the lens of China’s off-plan property market. While researching the country’s housing crisis, Hongxi Li became interested in the contemporary idea of “home” as a site where sentiment, aspiration, and economic value converge. The off-plan model—where lifestyle is designed, marketed, and sold before it exists—became a powerful allegory for national identity, governance, and the commodification of everyday life.

For the exhibition, Li reimagines the gallery as an off-plan property showroom. Six large-scale render works, developed in collaboration with architectural firm BAI Design International, propose a fictional residential district in East London titled Heaven Green. Identical 32-storey high-rise buildings, framed by porticos and fountains in a pastiche European style, are inserted into the landscape of Bethnal Green. This visual disjunction foregrounds differing cultural imaginaries of lifestyle and domestic aspiration between East Asia and the West. The project’s title echoes the pastoral naming conventions of Chinese real estate developments, which promise harmony and escape from the pressures of urban life.

Alongside the renders, a custom plinth presents cast-concrete sculptures resembling architectural maquettes shown to prospective buyers. Three depict completed residential towers, while a fourth unfinished structure—crowned with a translucent scaffold cap—suggests a penthouse forever suspended in anticipation. Drawing on the phenomenon of China’s “ghost cities,” the works explore the aesthetics of incompletion and the fragile boundary between promise and reality.

Through material, technique, and narrative, Li adopts and distorts the visual language of architectural marketing, revealing how the universal ideal of “home” becomes entangled with consumer desire, globalisation, and systems of power.