Hailin Li
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b.2002, Beijing, China
currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom
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education:
2025-2026 MA Painting, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom
Supported by Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award
2020-2024 BFA, Tufts University, Massachusetts, United States
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contact:
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statement (2026):
My painting begins with close inspection and intensified looking. I am drawn to things in everyday life that have interesting geometric shapes, either in a particular moment or simply in the way they already exist. When looking becomes intensified, through prolonged observation or the enlargement of a small detail, the original form begins to lose its stability. It moves away from function and narrative, becoming more about shape, space, surface, and sensation. In this process, the image does not become fully abstract. Rather, it lingers on the edge of abstraction. It remains connected to something real, but it is no longer simply that thing. For me, this in-between state, between recognition and uncertainty of the form, is where the tension of seeing and unfamiliarity of feeling begins.
Although my painting may appear visually close to minimalism through its simplification, flatness, and repetition, I am less interested in pure reduction as an end in itself. Instead, I am investigating how simplicity can function not only as intellectual reduction or form extraction, but also as an amplification of experience when it creates space for reimagining and reinterpretation, introducing unfamiliarity and shifting perception. To achieve this on the flat pictorial plane, I reinforce the texture and materiality of the surface while carefully selecting and translating these shapes and imagery. Through this process, the image gains a new sense of liveness within stillness, creating depth and interrupting the complete flatness of the painting. The experience also requires a longer time of seeing from the viewer. The longer one looks, the more one feels; the more one feels, the more questions, doubts, and reflections begin to appear. A simple image is no longer empty or fixed; it becomes polymorphic the longer one looks at it. For me, this way of making is not only about simplification or the pure formalist thinking, but about deepening the act of seeing and feeling through painting.