About Xi Li

Part One: Identity Background + Methodology + Research Directions

I am an interdisciplinary artist and researcher born in Harbin, a northeastern city in China, and currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Growing up amidst cultural, geopolitical, linguistic, and emotional ruptures has shaped my way of seeing—with a heightened sensitivity that extends beyond artistic forms to the ways in which art itself can respond to a complex world. My practice spans animation, moving image, 3D-printed sculpture, installation, interactive media, diagrammatic thinking, and theoretical writing, while also involving long-term research threads across multiple projects. These research strands explore the relationship between technology and the body, cultural memory and identity construction, natural materials and digital systems, colonial history and structures of perception. They guide my work, making each piece feel like a node in a vast conceptual mind map—intersecting, expanding, and forming a system over time.

I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design, and a Master of Fine Arts with First-Class Honours from Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. Over the years, I have presented solo exhibitions at major New Zealand institutions such as Te Tuhi, The Physics Room, and The Arts House Trust, as well as in exhibitions in Australia, Austria, and China. I am currently a Design Innovation Lecturer and MFA Supervisor at Whitecliffe, and a board member of Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA). Across these experiences of independent research, teaching, collaboration, and curatorial thinking, my project formats continue to shift—yet my methodology remains consistent: deep research, interdisciplinary dialogue, theoretical integration, and material experimentation. Part Two: Career Transition Phase + Long-Term Practice Vision + Current Challenges

My artistic career has now clearly entered a pivotal stage. I am certain about my direction and am transitioning toward an identity as an “artist with a research philosophy + curatorial experimentation + educator mindset.” I have accumulated extensive documentation of my work, developed a multimedia artistic language that crosses theoretical and media boundaries, and maintained a steady rhythm of medium-scale solo exhibitions, new project development, and participation in group shows each year. Concurrently, I have engaged in commissioned projects connected to arts events, cities, and festivals, such as SkyCity, Circuit Artist Moving Image Aotearoa New Zealand and Wellington City Council, and Te Waihorotiu Station (Aotea), among others.

Through teaching, writing, and project curation, I have demonstrated strong systemic capabilities—I am able to produce cutting-edge content but lack a dedicated, integrative space of resources. I recognize a serious shortage of time and financial support to develop something larger, more ambitious, and deeply impactful. While I am confident in my capacity to manage multiple short-term projects under pressure and sustain creative enthusiasm, this awareness has also made me realize my heartfelt desire for a longer-term opportunity that allows me to profoundly advance cross-disciplinary and sustained research, systematically organize my methodological framework, and achieve practical breakthroughs. This endeavor will require facing major milestones within a year—whether in material experimentation, cross-sector collaboration, methodological reconstruction, or platform building—initiating something that will influence my artistic trajectory for the next 5 to 10 years, or even further. Part Three: Non-Project-Driven Artistic Identity + The Necessity of Methodological Construction

I have been laying the groundwork for this path for many years—an artistic practice not reliant on “project-driven” cycles, but oriented toward building a long-term methodology, cross-media experimental frameworks, and a self-directed research platform. What I need now is a concentrated breakthrough that integrates resources, time, and thought. It requires moving beyond fragmented creation toward a systematic artistic research trajectory. I do not merely want to complete projects; I want to establish an interdisciplinary model of artistic research that remains rare in New Zealand and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

This funding will enable me to truly work as a mature and ambitiously focused experimental artist—no longer drifting fragmentarily between teaching, writing, and unpaid collaborations, but able to concentrate, accumulate, and consolidate a wholly new system of artistic knowledge, cross-media language, and research methodology. It will generate new visual languages and impact, and propel me to continuously construct and deepen an art path that is almost absent in New Zealand: a dual expansion toward both conceptual thinking and formal expression, an artistic grammar that navigates the intersections of virtuality, materiality, perceptual philosophy, and techno-political entanglements.

Part Four: Marginalized Perspectives + Unclassifiable Media Language + Critique of Heterogeneity

My work itself is complex, self-systemic, and continuously evolving, to the extent that I am deeply engaged in ongoing analysis and reflection from early production stages through to completion. I never settle into simply replicating a series or a matured body of work; rather, my artistic drive comes from my works cutting into a corner of the real world from multiple angles. I tear apart, fragment, and reconstruct the questions and issues I inhabit into visual pieces, narrative experiences, and exhibitions—parts that others can also confront with me. The approach is not warm but calmly laid out before us all.

Since beginning my practice in contemporary art, I have indeed found myself existing at a margin of margins—both in subject matter and medium, difficult to be instantly categorized within Western-centric narratives. For example, my work resists easy classification as “digital art,” a label that overlooks my passion for methodological rigor in media. If it were to be categorized as “Asian art,” it would fail to capture its multiethnic, globalized nature; it is more than an identity, a context, or a position—it is a living, ongoing condition that is often overlooked yet urgently demands attention. I have never ceased to resist producing works that satisfy geographic or identity-based expectations or aesthetics. Consequently, while my work may exhibit certain identity traits, its core concerns have always been those of the margin of margins.

Part Five: Absence in the New Zealand Context + What I Bring

I am acutely aware that the artistic language, research dimensions, and media experimentation I pursue are highly complex—especially as serious and nuanced interdisciplinary practices rooted in Asian contexts are often overlooked or marginalized. I also understand that, within the current institutional landscape, such work may not always be “immediately visible.” At the same time, New Zealand still lacks broad and in-depth engagement with virtuality, psychological structures, technological critique, non-Western contemporary philosophy, and material-media hybrid grammars. As a female technological subject and an Asian woman who occupies a minority position within contemporary society, art technology, and digital art, I am profoundly aware of the particular challenges and marginalizing narratives faced both in Aotearoa and internationally.

However, I believe this marginal position is precisely the starting point for my innovation and critique. An artist who continually advances her methodology and dares to pose complex questions should become an indispensable voice in the future cultural fabric of New Zealand. I am convinced that my practice represents an artistic trajectory still rare in New Zealand: deeply embedded in local lived experience, yet possessing a strong international theoretical perspective and experimental spirit. I am not merely a “representative” of an ethnicity or background, nor simply an indicator of “diversity”—I am constructing a practice system capable of taking root locally and generating innovation in both knowledge and form.

I never confine myself to “exhibition outputs” alone; rather, my goal is to establish a structural methodology, experimental frameworks, interdisciplinary grammar, and cultural translation capacities that push New Zealand’s Asian art context toward more complex cognitive dimensions.

Part Six: Summary of Challenges + Potential of the Fellowship

My current bottlenecks lie in:

The lack of a complete, structured period for development (incubation, creation, integration);

Insufficient funding to carry out intensive cross-media and interdisciplinary experimentation in a systematic way;

A shortage of resources to transform my long-term plans into a sustainable, ongoing “practice system”;

The absence of mechanisms to promote such avant-garde yet “not yet institutionalized” or easily recognized methodologies within New Zealand’s local context and broader international arenas and decision-makers.

I firmly believe that an artist with strong self-constructive capabilities, who raises genuine and complex questions, can become an irreplaceable node within a cultural context. I aim to offer a fresh perspective on the presence of Asian women in technology and art in New Zealand—that of female technological subjectivity. The work I am advancing represents an emerging, independent, interdisciplinary Asian artistic voice—rare and necessary in both Aotearoa and wider contexts—and I believe it is far from common. This is the contribution I hope to bring to the New Zealand arts community.