About

Ning Li is a visual artist and art educator whose practice explores the intersections of traditional East Asian aesthetics and contemporary photographic investigation. Her work examines time, materiality, and the liminal spaces between observation and transformation.

Before emigrating to Vancouver in 2003, Ning Li successfully operated businesses and a dance arts school in China for many years, cultivating a deep understanding of movement, rhythm, and aesthetic composition that would profoundly influence her later photographic work. In 2008, she founded the Canadian Association for the Promotion of East-West Artistic and Cultural Exchange. Through the Association, Li has been invited to and actively participates in numerous artistic and cultural exchange activities between Eastern and Western communities, creating vital bridges across continents.

Ning Li 's photographic practice is characterized by sustained investigation into specific themes across multiple series. Her work transforms everyday materials and processes into sites of aesthetic and philosophical inquiry. Series such as Light, Ink, Interface and Inkstone Meditations examine the traditional tools of Chinese calligraphy through macro photography, revealing abstract worlds within the inkstone pool. Cursive Fire captures the gestural energy of flame through long exposure, creating luminous calligraphic traces that bridge elemental force and artistic mark-making. Temporal Weaving documents urban light trajectories, transforming the city's circulation into visual scores of time and movement. Transparent Pause explores the suspension of organic time through frozen botanical specimens, while Slow Inscriptions attends to the patient authorship of weathering and decay on architectural surfaces.

Across these interconnected bodies of work, Ning Li investigates different temporal modes—preparation, release, flow, suspension, and gradual inscription—revealing how time manifests visually across natural, technological, and human-mediated processes. Her practice moves fluidly between East Asian philosophical frameworks (concepts of qi, meditation, and the aesthetics of impermanence) and Western photographic traditions of abstraction and indexicality.

Ning Li's work has been exhibited in cultural institutions across Canada and China. She continues to develop her practice while actively contributing to artistic and cultural exchange between Eastern and Western communities. Her photographs invite viewers to reconsider familiar materials and processes, finding the extraordinary within the overlooked, the cosmic within the quotidian, and the profound within patient observation.