Introduction
Amy Hui Li’s first solo exhibition with Unit, paradise lost, sits at the intersection between painting, sculpture, and installation. She explores the body both literally and metaphorically through an abstract visual language, with her fabric forms evoking veins and blood vessels as well as the emotional processes of healing and repair. Repetitively tearing and reshaping home-made fabrics, Li expresses fragility, brokenness and a drive towards intimacy.
Since graduating Li has exhibited widely across London, New York, and Taiwan. In 2024, Li participated in Unit’s group exhibition Worlds Beyond, exemplifying the show’s theme of interweaving organic, mineral and corporeal elements and connecting form and space beyond the confines of the canvas.
Inspired by the interdisciplinary work of Anish Kapoor, Tracey Emin and the textile practice of Celia Pym, Li experiments with handmade felt and organza, liberating her materials by working very much outside the lines. The dynamic, textural hanging works also express the idea of destruction as itself a form of creation.
Li imagines the canvas as a body, onto which external forms can reveal underlayers of emotion. What Li calls “hidden emotions”, and Kapoor labels the “inner self”, drive the balance between the inner and outer self, the physical and emotional, in Li’s work. Red felt and oil painting reminiscent of blood vessels or muscle tissue emphasises the corporeal focus while a symbolic use of colour and gestural form projects a certain passion and intensity. The tearing of fabric and the variable opacity in her work projects a sense of intimacy and vulnerability. Each canvas represents an extension of the artist’s body, exposing her inner self and challenging the viewer to reflect on their own internal emotions.
Selected Works
Amy Hui Li
a mix tape of every sound that exists
2024
110 x 150 cm
Amy Hui Li
extracted delight
2023
170 x 140 cm
Amy Hui Li
orange forest
2024
40 x 30 cm
Amy Hui Li
don’t you think about me enough?
2024
123 x 100 cm
Amy Hui Li
heartless #02
2024
60 x 60 cm
Amy Hui Li
bare skin
2024
20 x 70 cm
Collecting
Biography
Amy Hui Li (b.1997, Guangzhou, China) lives and works in London. She received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in the summer 2023 after a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2020.
Her paintings explore a deep self-reflection of wounded emotions, personal memories, fragility and vulnerability. The journey of self-discovery and learning how to deal with a broken heart has become the focus of her practice. Working with a restrained palette, each colour represents a stage in time: red is the present, blue is the past, and other colours such as white symbolises a positive message to the future – a beautiful unknown that has yet to be discovered.
Amy Hui Li has exhibited internationally, with recent group exhibitions including: Airy Dish, River Art Gallery, Taichung (2024); Theater of Energies, Arsenal Contemporary, New York (2024); Can you Afford to ‘Pay’ Attention?, Heart Lab, London (2024); and London Calling (2023) and Worlds Beyond (2024) at Unit, London.
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