Bio

Lingli Li (b. 1991, Xinxiang, China) has been based in Cyprus since 2016. She received her BFA in Oil Painting from Henan Normal University (2016) and her MFA in Contemporary Art from Frederick University, Cyprus (2020).

Working as a painter and writer, she explores the contemporary human condition through painting from nature and prose. Her practice reflects her own journey of integration and personal exploration.

Her work engages with the space between reality and expansion — through perception — drawing from the essence of both Eastern and Western thought and culture.

She lives and works in Cyprus.

Artist Statement

My practice is rooted in the quiet stability of everyday life, and in a sustained interest in how life unfolds and grows naturally.

Having worked outside the arts for many years, I am attentive to how consciousness, habit, and social structures shape our reality. At the same time, living in Cyprus has brought me into a personal relationship with its environment: trees, sky, sea, changing light, and the rhythms of the seasons. These have become integral to my visual experience and to my understanding of space, nature, and life.

Painting is an extension of this attentiveness. Through colour, gesture, space, and form, I transform personal experiences of perception into an independent visual language.

My painting is informed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, as well as by the spiritual sensibilities of Chinese calligraphy and Taoist thought. Through these different cultural and philosophical traditions, I have come to see points of connection between their ways of thinking about the body, perception, and the world. These ideas have helped me recognise and deepen what I was already exploring in my painting: a return to direct perception in nature, an openness to a more expansive experience in which the boundaries between subject and object begin to dissolve, and an ongoing inquiry into a more harmonious and natural way of being.

My aim is not to reproduce a particular place or an idealised way of life, but to explore, through painting, a state of being that is open, natural, and changing. I want to remain attentive to those ordinary experiences that quietly sustain life and allow it to unfold.

Teaching / Experience

  • 2022–Present  Private Art Tutor, Nicosia, Cyprus

Subjects: Drawing, Oil Painting, Watercolour

Professional Development / Programs

  • 2026 – Participant, Open Call WIP Crit Sessions, Cyprus

Awards

  • 2018 Lhasa Impression awarded The 23rd Henan Province New Artists and New Works Exhibition Excellence Award.
  • 2017 The Little Girl, pastel on paper, selected into the 3rd Children‘s Theme Works Exhibition of Anhui Province Artists Works Exhibition.
  • 2016 Dali Impression awarded the 22nd Henan Province New Artists and New Works Exhibition Excellence Award.
  • 2015 Indigo Taihang Mountain awarded the 21st Henan Province New Artists and New Works Exhibition Excellence Award.