Li Li Ren employs a wide range of materials in her practice, ranging from the soft and ethereal to the hard and heavy, in order to generate specialised environments. Her recent works interrogate inter-body and inter-temporal connection through the aquatic. They speak to her interest in the physics of water flow as symbolic of a desire to understand not only the distant presence of human memory and intimacy, but that of natural organisms beyond the anthropoid.

 

Central to this is a preoccupation with semiotics, specifically communication beyond verbal and written language. In her submerged realm, marine lifeforms surpass spatial disjunction through electric currents running between them, interpreted by specialised receptors of sensation that await information.

 

An integral element to the makeup and origin of her practice is the parallel between ancient-or-future creatures communicating through waves and ripples, and the ineffable sensation of motherhood and the imagining of the womb as akin not to our constructed worlds and languages, but rather to something older, rooted in sensation.

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Li Li Ren (b. 1986) lives and works in London. She gained her BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in 2010, and her MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2017. Solo exhibitions include: Sunset as Burning Bruise, Magician Space, Beijing (2022) and Frantumaglia, Qimu Space, Beijing (2021). Group exhibitions include: Home is where the haunt is, X Museum, Beijing (2023); Sculptural vibe cutting through (in) accessible sites, Gravity Art Musuem, Beijing (2023); Into My Arms, Sherbet Green (2023); Memorias del subdesarrollo, Qimu Space, Beijing (2021); In/Out, Guardian Art Center, Beijing (2020); Silence in Violence, Spectrum Art Space, Shanghai (2018); and Camden Arts Centre, London (2017). She is represented by Magician Space, Beijing, in China, and Sherbet Green in Europe. She will have her first solo exhibition at Sherbet Green in January 2024.

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