Jinshuai Li
Jinshuai Li, lives and works in Paris, France. His practice examines the unresolved emotional structures shaped by contemporary East Asian migration to the West, grounded in the entanglement between the individual, the family of origin, and diasporic identity, where intimacy and rupture coexist.
At its core lies a fractured relationship with his mother-a bond of attachment, estrangement, resentment, and unfulfilled longing for
reconciliation. Li treats this not as biography but as a structural condition through which broader experiences of displacement can be understood.
Through figurative and ambiguous self-portraits and family portraits, he holds familial tension in suspension, revealing the coexistence of love and violence, proximity and withdrawal. His restrained visual language reflects emotional containment-a distance from loved ones that becomes both protection and lasting solitude.
Extending this inquiry, Li engages with "emotional exile," where migration is not only geographical but affective, unfolding within fractured family systems and cultural obligations. Since migrating to France, he has connected personal memory with the realities of migrant communities, tracing how subjects negotiate identity, trauma, and adaptation across cultures. Rather than offering resolution, his practice makes fragmentation visible-identity formed not through coherence, but through rupture, hesitation, and incomplete repair.
