Primarily working in photography, London-based visual artist Zesheng Li has honed a visual metonymy that explores the intersection of spirituality, landscape and the poetics of impermanence. His images, mostly monochromatic, are born among the elements, portraits of landscapes that conceal as much as they reveal.
Li’s lens moves quietly through rural terrains, pilgrimage routes, and elemental spaces, hovering between presence and absence, rest and unrest, distance and closeness. These pauses, peaceful yet pregnant, beckon us to sit for a while and pay slow, close attention to the forces of nature at work. To listen to the world when it has nothing to say aloud.
In a recent solo exhibition, The Thin Place held at Apsara Studio in London this summer, Li beautifully consolidates the religious and pastoral iconography that proliferates his practice. Patent symbols of religion are present, a crucifix, for example, and a statuette of Jesus set within a niche of a Church facade. But he offers alternative manifestations of the divine, too.
We’re led down unpeopled paths, linger in rural stables, and observe cattle grazing. Li generally avoids overt intervention in his photographs, allowing light, time and atmosphere to shape each composition. In doing so, these otherwise secular spaces are, at his behest, endowed with a natural spiritual quality, or rather, give the impression of an openness to spiritual forces.
One particularly striking addition to Li’s solo show is the piece I, US, THEM (2023), a triptych of a flock of sheep enshrined in a shallow, spectral fog. As Li moved through the changing landscapes, engaging in fleeting human interactions, he sought to document the way we relate to one another, how we approach, how we distance and how we exist between the individual and the collective. In a poetic accompaniment to both works, he writes, “There were people I wanted to leave behind, making me walk faster. Others, I wished to hold on to, prompting me to slow down and wait. Either way, it meant stepping out of the ‘us’ and back into the ‘I’, eventually becoming someone else’s ‘them’. Looking back at my series of animal photographs, I feel they might also reflect on this concept. Within the frames, I see the interplay of ‘I’, ‘us’, and ‘them’”.
The omnipresent mist in Li’s photographs is both sculptural and metaphorical, a spiritual agent that further embodies his quiet subversion of the boundaries between the earthly and the divine. In the Celtic spiritual tradition, these interfaces – ”thin places” between one world and another – are not tied to any specific location but are instead states of heightened perception. Zesheng Li settles on these ordinary, peaceful and sometimes eerie locales, allowing the viewer to project the unseen architectures of their own experience into the frame.
Written by Millen Brown-Ewens
