Amy Hui Li: For the Love of Colour

In anticipation of her debut solo exhibition, paradise lost, we profile Chinese contemporary artist Amy Hui Li to dive into the potent undercurrents of her blood-red, heart-wrenching artworks.

For Amy Hui Li, life revolves around painting. The act of mixing colour and material, combined with the physicality of manifesting emotions externally from her body, has remained the driving force behind her practice ever since she took her first steps towards becoming an artist. 

Educated in Guangzhou, China, Li moved to London at the earliest opportunity to study Fine Art at Goldsmiths, which she followed up with a Master’s in Painting at the Royal College of Art (RCA). 

“Goldsmiths helped me build up a professional mindset towards art,” she explains, “I learnt how to work within a critical framework, answer tough questions, and digest and utilise these responses to my work mentally and physically. The unifying solution I found to all these questions was to consistently choose subject matter close to my heart, and work with my passions.”

This hard-learned understanding at such a formative point in her career has given Li an impressively coherent foundation to her work; her expanded paintings rise and writhe beyond the frames of her canvases, striking many emotional chords simultaneously. They cut deep, but not before she has cut them first, slicing and tearing through felt, organza and other fabrics to somatise her emotions in blood-red works. They draw attention as an open wound might, invoking anxious intrigue, empathy and an impulsive want to reach out and touch it.

Wounds, both emotional and physical, provide a clear through-line to her debut solo exhibition, paradise lost, opening at Unit on December 11 2024. Exploring the duality of the heart as the organ of both life and love, Li explains why it has become the central symbol of her work: “Love is my earnest passion, but it also brings me pain. Working towards this exhibition has been a journey of self discovery, and learning how to deal with a broken heart has become the focus of my work.”

This introspective journey into both body and soul is mirrored in the materials of her artworks, with layers of fabric drenched in viscous, bright red oil paints replicating the visual potency of torn flesh, the mottled discolouration of a bruise, or the interiority of blood vessels.

Continuing the bodily analogy, Li even equates the act of exhibiting her work to, “Revealing my scars and my inner self to the public. It requires bravery.” She recently told EST8 Magazine that the hardest part of her practice is accepting vulnerability, a trait shared with one of her artistic heroes Tracey Emin. Both artists use their work as a space to express deeply withheld secrets, but Li takes inspiration not just from Emin’s paintings themselves, but also her use of art to mediate between herself and others. “I appreciate her confidence to reveal her personal life to the public and enjoy it at the same time,” Li reveals, “As we all know her work is extremely personal, sexual and intimate, which resonates with her audiences in many different ways. But over time Tracey’s stories fade from our minds, and we are only left with their beautiful and meaningful impact on our own lives.”

A further giant of contemporary art who has left an indelible impact on Li’s practice is Anish Kapoor, who according to Li, “Inspired me to see how powerful a single colour could be, and discover my own relationship to colour.”

Li has developed her own codification system via which she attaches significance to individual colours, mostly red, blue, white and orange – although elements of green are beginning to creep in.

Without question though, and similarly to Kapoor, red is her signature colour, and any other tone or hue will forever stand in apposition to it. “Red represents passion, but when passion gets really serious or overloaded, it can grow into pain. Colour for me is like a stage in life, or a stage in time, where I think red is the most present and lively, happening right now. Blue is more in the past, through which memory has had time to be filtered so only the best parts remain. Blue is more gentle to work with, and I have also begun to use white to represent hope.”

It is clear colour and emotion are inseparably linked in Li’s work, and she has found a masterfully nuanced vehicle to project simultaneous narratives of physicality, abstract anatomy, emotional distress and material healing.

The development of these abstract concepts can again be found in the influence of Kapoor, as she recalls, “I’m obsessed with a series of paintings Kapoor did between 2012–16, in which he used a massive amount of red silicone on torn-off canvas, with multiple overlapping layers, almost looking like a living body. I heard that he used pigments and honey to achieve the bloody effects. The most important thing, however, is that I resonated so strongly with these works, and as I was looking, all their struggles and pain started to appear. I knew this is what wounded emotions must look like from the inside.”

In short, paradise lost proves to be the artist’s most complete and searingly heartfelt body of work to date. Despite the trepidation Li feels on the eve of exhibiting her work, in this case she is beginning to find satisfaction in the process, rather than just in the results.

“I feel excited, since this body of work has achieved a level of completion as a whole, and is ready to face the public, to be seen.”

paradise lost is open at Unit until 26 January 2025