Yaxuan Li Between Language, Sensation and Control

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For Yaxuan Li, colour is rarely allowed to remain passive. It collides, overlaps, leaks across boundaries and competes for visual attention. Yet to describe her work simply as colourful would be to miss the more complicated proposition at stake. Li treats colour not as decoration, nor even purely as a vehicle for emotion, but as a structure through which perception can be organised.

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This distinction matters. The claim that colour functions as a kind of language is familiar territory in abstract painting, and on its own risks becoming little more than metaphor. What makes Li’s practice more specific is her attempt to connect that claim to two seemingly unrelated areas of experience: linguistics and floristry. Alongside her academic trajectory, she has worked as a florist, developing an intimate familiarity with flowers and plant materials.

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The combination is unusual, but not automatically productive. The more interesting question is whether these backgrounds actually alter the way the work operates. In Li’s case, her work repeatedly returns to questions of organisation: how meaning is framed, how attention is directed, and how apparently spontaneous responses are shaped by underlying structures. Floristry contributes a different form of knowledge. Flowers therefore appear in her practice not simply as motifs, but as unstable signs.

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The tension between these two tendencies—analysis and seduction—is perhaps the most productive aspect of her work. Li wants the viewer to respond instinctively to colour while remaining aware that such responses are never entirely innocent or uncontrolled. Her paintings invite sensation, but they also construct the conditions under which that sensation takes place.

Li’s 2025 solo exhibition Jumping Colours, held at Dongfang Art Museum in Shenyang and curated by Liang Wang, presented a body of abstract paintings developed through sustained experiments with colour. The exhibition ran from 1 to 21 May and brought together works made over the preceding year. These paintings are most convincing when understood not as autonomous compositions but as variations within an ongoing visual investigation. Different colours are tested against one another across shifts in scale, density and structure. In some works, adjacent hues create friction; elsewhere, apparently incompatible elements arrive at a temporary equilibrium. Shapes and boundaries seem less predetermined than produced through the encounter between one colour and another.

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This process-based approach gives the paintings a degree of openness. Accidents, revisions and unevenness remain visible, resisting the impression of a fully resolved pictorial system. Painting here functions as a method of testing rather than illustrating a conclusion.

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A significant shift becomes visible in Li’s participation in Colour & Nature, presented at The Chapel, Brompton Cemetery in London on 1–2 August 2026. Organised by The Friends of Brompton Cemetery and The Urgency of Art, and co-curated by Shushun Qi and Zena Flores-Montague, the exhibition included Li’s Blooming Flame and a Sweet Dream. The work was also recognised as one of the winning works of The Urgency of Art Prize 2026.

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Here, Li’s earlier concern with colour expands into something more spatial and bodily. The acrylic painting imagines a strange landscape populated by flower-like forms in electric blue, fiery orange and dusty pink. Rather than presenting nature as something observed, the work invents an artificial ecology—one that feels simultaneously botanical, extraterrestrial and psychologically familiar.

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More important than the imagery itself is the way the work was installed. Positioned above a stone column in the chapel, the irregularly shaped painted panel extended downward through pink tulle and lace. Painting was no longer confined to a rectangular surface; it entered into a relationship with fabric, architecture and the viewer’s body.

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This move strengthens Li’s practice because it makes one of her recurring claims materially explicit. If perception is produced rather than simply received, then the work cannot rely on image alone. The viewer encounters differences in weight, opacity and texture: solid painted surface against translucent fabric, saturated pigment against the muted stone of the chapel. Colour becomes environmental rather than merely pictorial.

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But the decorative seductiveness of tulle, lace and floral imagery also introduces a useful ambiguity. These materials can easily slip into romanticism or aesthetic excess. Li does not entirely resist that possibility; instead, the work seems to exploit it. Attraction becomes part of its mechanism. The viewer is drawn towards surfaces that are deliberately pleasurable before being asked to consider how that pleasure has been constructed.

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That tension makes Blooming Flame and a Sweet Dream more compelling than a straightforward celebration of colour or nature. Its sweetness is not simply innocent. The work uses beauty as a way of directing attention.

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The trajectory from Shenyang to London suggests a practice gradually moving beyond the self-contained problem of abstract painting. In Jumping Colours, Li investigates how colours behave in relation to one another. In Blooming Flame and a Sweet Dream, that investigation begins to encompass the space around the painting and the physical position of the viewer.

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What remains unresolved is the relationship between Li’s conceptual framework and the immediate visual appeal of her work. Her background in linguistics encourages an analytical vocabulary of systems, structures and constructed meanings; her experience with floristry pulls in the opposite direction, towards material pleasure, abundance and sensory intuition. Neither side fully dominates.

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This unresolved friction is more interesting than any attempt to reconcile the two.

Li’s most promising works are not those in which colour simply “expresses” an emotion, nor those that require linguistic theory to justify their existence. They emerge when the viewer can feel structure operating before being able to name it: when colour attracts and controls at the same time, when beauty becomes a form of organisation, and when looking is revealed as something less spontaneous than it first appears.

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For Li, then, colour may indeed function as a language—but its most interesting quality lies not in what it says. It lies in how quietly it tells us where to look.