Biography

Born in China, Fei Li lives and works in Brooklyn. She studied with Lon Clark at the San Francisco Studio School and in 2012 moved to New York City, a vortex where the seething metropolitan life and the artist's solitude converge. Her work engages in exploring contradictions within what she perceives to be a wide spectrum of chaos. In part, her multicultural life-experience contributes to this approach. It creates ambiguities of meaning and at the same time leads to crossing borders of language and societal constraints as she creates new structures. As a consequence of investigating this multiplicity of narrative and emotional elements, the formal qualities in her work are often pushed to the edge of cohesion. These complex relationships give rise to a tension between phantasmagoric imagery and the pursuit of an energy-infused aesthetic unity. The artist is confronting between irreconcilable often painful aspects of our daily lives, while at the same time recognizing their absurdities. Her work is to imbue these dissonances with a deeply-felt sensory order. Li's works have been shown internationally in museums and galleries, including The Katonah Museum of Art, Spartanburg Museum and Whatcom Museum in the United States, Museum of Abbaye de Léhon in France, Asian Culture Center in South Korea and Chinese European Art Center in China. Li is also the awardee of numerous funded artist's residencies, fellowships and grants including Yaddo in the States (forthcoming); Dumfries House in Scotland; Drake Arts Centre in Finland; The Alfred & Trafford Klots International Program in France; Kunstnarhuset Messen International A.I.R Program in Norway; Jon Imber Painting Fellowship in Vermont Studio Center, and Queens Arts Fund New Works Grant.