Li-Hill in Motion and “The Impact of Discovery” in Kiev

Street Artist Li-Hill is a professor and student of the science of motion on the street and in the public sphere, with figures captured at increments along a path of movement. Often his large scale murals reveal the nature of the journey that brings the figure forward in space, merging the energy and particles that comprise it. His largest mural to date, completed last week in Kiev, is as much a tribute to the science of particle physics as it is to the study of the human form in kinetic motion.

Li-Hill in Kiev for Sky Art Foundation and Mural Social Club. Kiev, Ukraine. May 2016. (photo © Film UA )

Painted with the support of Sky Art Foundation and Mural Social Club founder Dmytro Palienko and curated by Oleg Sosnov and Yulia Ostrovska, Li-Hill super-collides science and motion photography in an enormous way not often seen with the naked eye. Painted on the multi-façade of the Kieve Polytechnical Institute, the Ukraine’s largest science and technical school, Li-Hill is capturing many explosions at once.

An interpretation of hydrogen protons flying into one another and creating an explosion, the piece points to the earliest photography that captured motion by laying plates over one another, like those of the 1880s made at the University of Pennsylvania by Eadweard Muybridge.

Li-Hill in Kiev for Sky Art Foundation and Mural Social Club. Kiev, Ukraine. May 2016. (photo © Film UA )

Considering his work more science than art, his work along with that of Etienne-Jules Marey studied the range of human and animal motion, causing an explosion in the study by artists as well. In fact Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, debuting nearly a quarter century after Muybridge’s own photographic studies of a woman descending stairs sparked an uproar on both sides of the Atlantic to the highest office of the White House.

Here Li-Hill says he was thinking of the impact on cinema as well and considers this an interpretation of the struggles he sensed in his host country. These conflicts he says, have the potential to “breed discoveries that, through struggle, enable culture, identity and community to be forged.”