Chinese actress Gong Li was among sixteen global thinkers and artists whose portraits were displayed at the United Nations Headquarters in New York during The Transformative Power of Art, an exhibition held in June 2015 as part of the United Nations campaign 2015: Time for Global Action.
The exhibition was organized in conjunction with the President of the General Assembly and presented a series of monumental fresco portraits by Fabrizio Ruggiero, bringing together figures whose lives and work contributed to the common good of humanity.
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The portraits combined the ancient technique of fresco with contemporary visual research, repositioning permanence, responsibility and symbolic presence within the context of contemporary art. Rather than functioning as celebrity portraits, they were conceived as civic effigies — images of ethical and cultural resonance.
Alongside Gong Li, the exhibition included portraits of Audrey Hepburn, Maya Angelou, Joan Baez, Wole Soyinka, Malala Yousafzai, Edgar Morin, Sebastião Salgado, Miriam Makeba, Satyajit Ray, Vassily Kandinsky, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and others whose work transformed public consciousness.
Through paintings, sculpture, handmade paper forms and dried flowers, the exhibition articulated a curatorial proposition: to restore human dignity to the center of institutional imagination, and to reaffirm the role of art as a field of ethical attention.
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