Sea View is pleased to present Where We Left It, the US debut of London-based artist Shuangyi Li (b. 2000, Heilongjiang, CH). The exhibition will run from January 10 through February 7, with a public opening on January 10 from 6–8 pm.

Shuangyi Li’s paintings are atemporal, in one moment recalling the Victorian tragedies of the Brontë sisters and in another, the contemporary experience of urban life. The lack of historic specificity in these works is an intentional decision by Li to relate to the viewer through tension and mood, rather than by offering any tangible sense of time or place. In the end, the work reflects a coming-of-age, an ubiquitous experience that is at once both isolating yet universal, intimate yet indiscriminate, and daunting yet liberating.

Over the past year, Li has expanded upon the subject of intergenerational family dynamics into an autonomous realm beyond formal frameworks of relations and identity. This energetic departure from the hyper-personal removes narrative constraints from her images, allowing them to exist within residual moments of inaccessible mystery, as if an inscrutable action has just taken place. Rather than resolving themselves, Li’s cinematic paintings suspend legibility and offer moments shaped both physically and psychologically by erosion and withdrawal.

The dry, attenuated surfaces of the paintings expose their linen bases, producing a pictorial field in which depth is flattened and spatial hierarchies are destabilized. This emphasis on surface situates the work within a lineage concerned with structures of viewing– recalling, for example, Gerhard Richter’s negotiations between gesture and objective representation, Vuillard's static picture planes, and Sanyu's flattened spatial constructions. Li’s motifs– stoic trees, a solitary cargo ship, shrouded pigeons, and faceless women– are presented with just enough symbolic distance as to not operate with clear narrative functions, though the viewer is liable to search for embedded meaning. Instead, viewing shifts from interpreting the image to encountering evidence: surface marks, compressed space, and suspended scenes. What persists is structure– how looking is organized, how paint accumulates across surfaces, and how absence becomes a material condition of the image itself.

In 2024, Li received her BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai, CN (2025); Painters Painting Paintings (2025); and group exhibitions include NADA Miami, Sea View, Miami, FL (2025); Hew Hood Gallery, London, UK (2025); The Artist Room, London, UK (2024); and Chilli Art Projects, London, UK (2024).