Xinzhi Li
Xinzhi Li standing next to Unveiling V, 2024, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 150cm x 120cm
Xinzhi Li
Romulus Folio Gallery, South Melbourne
Xinzhi Li’s painting operates at the threshold between image and sensation. Her work reconstructs the body through colour, fragmentation and flux.
Working across fluid, layered surfaces, Li develops a visual language in which figures emerge, dissolve and reconfigure within saturated chromatic fields. Limbs blur into atmosphere. Faces surface and recede. Boundaries remain permeable, holding a continuous state of transformation.
At the core of Li’s practice is an ongoing investigation into the interior self. Her paintings move through psychological terrain, drawing on memory, perception and embodied experience. The surface becomes a site of encounter where multiple registers coexist.
In this work, colour is activated.
Luminous reds, electric violets, yellows and translucent washes generate environments that unfold through time. Gesture accumulates across the surface with varying degrees of control and release, leaving traces of hesitation, return and transformation.
The figure exists in a continual process of becoming.
Xinzhi Li, Unveiling IV, 2024, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 120cm x 90cm
Inside Wonder
Presented at Romulus Folio Gallery, Inside Wonder marks a significant development in Li’s practice, bringing together a body of work that intensifies her exploration of perception, sensation and the body as site.
Installed within the open architectural environment of The Gladstone, the exhibition extends into spatial experience. Scale, proximity and duration shape how the work is encountered. The viewer enters into the field of the painting through movement and attention.
Across the exhibition, Li sustains a tension between intimacy and exposure. The works invite close attention while maintaining a shifting perceptual state. Forms remain in motion, held within layered colour structures that continue to unfold.
This condition generates the force of the work.
Li constructs a space in which perception remains active, where the viewer navigates between recognition and abstraction, presence and dissolution.
Xinzhi Li, Xinzhi Li, Unveiling III, 2024, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 92cm x 76cm
Context
Xinzhi Li’s practice sits within a broader contemporary movement that reconsiders figuration through material and psychological inquiry. Her work contributes to this field through a sustained focus on colour as a carrier of sensation and on the body as a perceptual construct.
Within Inside Wonder, this investigation is sharpened. The paintings operate individually while forming a cohesive environment across the gallery.
A focused presentation by Usha Newland extends this dialogue, introducing a secondary position that engages related questions of interiority and perception.
Exhibition Details
Inside Wonder
1 April to 3 May 2026
Opening Night
Friday 17 April, 5 to 7pm
Romulus Folio Gallery
@ The Gladstone
55 Gladstone Street
South Melbourne
Opening Hours
Wednesday to Friday 12pm to 7pm
Saturday to Sunday 12pm to 5pm
Closing
Xinzhi Li’s work remains open, unstable and in motion.
In Inside Wonder, painting becomes a field of experience where the body is encountered through colour, sensation and sustained looking.
