In Period Room (Azalea) presented in her group exhibition at Latitude Gallery in 2024, I noticed the anachronistic presence of modernist office furnishings inserted into a room adorned with bourgeois, buoyant decorations—crystal chandeliers and ornate paneling—creating a striking juxtaposition of time periods and aesthetics. A pair of blue ceramic garden table and stool are half-hidden between the contemporary wooden door and the extravagant Western decorations, echoing with the ceramic flower pot in the foreground. In the middle of work fragments, a three-level cupboard with an open glass door houses a collection of ceramic vessels and broken porcelain in various sizes and patterns—some of these artifacts are replicas of Chinese ceramics from countries along the Silk Road. Two other vases are placed on the floor, their shadows cast onto a background wall layered with textures that resemble fabric, wallpaper, or printed surfaces. In Pond: Artifacts and Hands, a pair of hands in suits occupy the visual center, marked by focused, engaged gestures. In the foreground, various cut-out objects—including yellow and green pagodas and black-and-white rocks—appear to protrude from an open book that rests on the table, its pages marked by cut-out holes.

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Li’s scenes exist out of sync—not only temporally, but culturally. Yet the staged quality, shaped by her dramaturgic approach, renders their absurdity and surrealism strangely coherent, even plausible, as if they emerge from a fusion of the artist’s dreams, memories, and imagination. The visible traces of cutting, collaging, scanning, and reprinting lend the works a tactile authenticity, making the collection feel all the more playful as it navigates the shifting tensions between subjectivity and objectivity, illusion and reality, history and memory.