Amy Hui Li: paradise lost

11 Dec 2024-19 Jan 2025

Overview

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.