“How can one remember thirst?”: An Interview With Xi Li
Xi Li, Deep Emotions (Tulips), 2022. Archival pigment print mounted on Dibond, customized aluminum frame, 28 x 35 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Photographer and artist Xi Li captures the fleeting everywhere she goes—like a child catching a caterpillar and watching it cocoon and metamorphize. She nabs archival images, old magazines, and vintage propaganda, cuts them, and rehomes them within her paper stages, giving a new context to the transient glimpses of an unreachable world. “I treat the process of making images as a way of historical reconstruction, allowing myself to return to a time and space that I have never experienced,” Li says. “I approach the past as an outsider, aiming to understand it but sometimes deliberately mistranslating it.”
Li is currently an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects, a program that offers artists year-long studio spaces at 4 World Trade Center. There, she scatters her space with reprints from archival magazines. Her current fixation includes a collection of China Pictorial magazines that dates from the 1950s to the ’90s, which she picked up while visiting her family in her hometown, Suzhou, earlier this year. She also stores a collection of books from her grandfather, who worked in the city’s ancient architectural restoration department. “For me, Suzhou will always be home, and every time I return, I deeply feel its cultural, artistic, and historical essence,” Li says.
Xi Li, Period Room (Consider The Lilies), 2024. Archival pigment print, mounted on Dibond, white wood frame, 25 x 20 inch. Courtesy of the artist.
“The images from the past have faded while some of them are damaged and hard to recognize,” Li says. This works perfectly for her art practice. Li’s image-making process is not so much a recapturing but instead a total reconstruction. She references a quote from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil: “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”
After collecting these photos, she removes her chosen elements—a Grecian column, a Ming vase, or a mid-century modern office chair—and arranges them within her model “stage” using colored tape and hot glue. Then, using a large-format camera, she photographs them under old-school tungsten lights.
Xi Li in her studio at Silver Art Projects. Courtesy of the artist.
Li moved to New York at 18 to study industrial design at Pratt Institute, which she credits for her interest in utilizing the three-dimensional space in her visual storytelling. Later, she moved on to photography after working as a designer at Apple. Her artistry then blossomed into a way to evaluate and investigate her relationship to her own memories and concept of home. “Although the physical distance from home and the temporal distance from the past increase the barrier, whether it’s the natural landscapes I grew up near or the sunrise I saw on a family trip, they generate an image, setting up as a big seamless backdrop, and a memory I reconstruct through time,” she says.
Installation view of Xi Li’s work in Someplace, a group exhibition at LATITUDE Gallery, NYC. Courtesy of the artist and LATITUDE Gallery.
She recently presented some of these works at LATITUDE Gallery for the group exhibition Someplace. For her, these pieces' three-dimensional, model-making aspect is thematically critical. “I intentionally create a sense of space in my photographs,” she says. “During my time at Yale, I was greatly inspired by Gaston Bachelard's book The Poetics of Space … He wrote in the book that space is not just a container filled with objects, but a dwelling place of human consciousness.”
The result is almost surreal, like a lost childhood memory reconstructed in a Frankensteinian fashion. This all ties into Li’s interest in the concepts of remembering and forgetting, and her pull toward the unreachable—things that will never be fully remembered again. These photos, which span generations and continental divides, should not make up one single whole, and yet when they are placed within context, they are given a new, more stable meaning, grafted from a few fleeting moments in time.
Xi Li, Pond: Artifacts and Hands, 2024. Archival pigment print, mounted on Dibond, customized frame, 28 x 35 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Her image-making process, then, becomes dual-sided. On the one hand, her work reconnects the visual present with the intangible nostalgia for her home in Suzhou. In a literal sense, she is constructing a home, using paper memories left by family members and those who shared her experiences.
On the other hand, she also achieves a totally fictitious reconstruction of memories that were never even hers to begin with, taking photographs of moments doomed to never be remembered again. These works afford a new emotional basis and an alternate temporal space. You begin to feel nostalgia for a moment that never even existed. “The practice gradually becomes a home-building process. Memories become an image of home, to represent a sense of belonging; the vision of home then becomes a unique, intangible space—a fictitious environment fabricated around the self,” Li says.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
