Sofia Li

My work explores embodied memory as a physical space by reconstructing autobiographical and mythological imagery into contemporary psychological landscapes. Through translucent bodies and charged environments, I explore how memory, an accumulation of familial, historical, and emotional inheritance, is a physical substance that reconstructs lived experience. 

My painting process is rooted in indeterminacy, in which recollection is fragmented and unstable. Images arrive unannounced and often vanish before they can be fully grasped. Often starting from photographs, I aim to transcend source images by weaving together incomplete memories or emotional associations in the form of architectural elements and organic forms.

Across my paintings, figures float, suspend, and dissolve. Familiar landscapes coexist with translucent architectural outlines. The layering of oil paint allows forms to emerge and recede and transparency allows for certain objects or figures to exist as still palpable, yet not quite real. Ultimately, the past always remains visible beneath the present.

Color functions as both structure and emotion in my work, filtering memory through a kind of hallucinatory lens. I use color not to resolve feeling, but to hold it in suspension where moments hover between warmth and grief, comfort and unease, offering no fixed conclusion. These psychological terrains are not singular moments, but an accumulation of fragile memories that are layered, indeterminate, and permeable.

The psychological timelines I aim to capture are not built by external forces but are embedded in my inherited lineage. Gestures of care, burden, history and repetition are what is passed down internally. By blurring imagined or fantastical spaces with familiar historical and personal forms, these paintings are reflective sites where memory, intuition, and emotion coalesce. In this way, each work operates as a living archive in continuous flux as new layers are added, erased, and reconfigured, mirroring the unstable yet persistent nature of memory itself.