The German thinker and representative figure of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, believed that the essence of photography is "the redemption of the instant" — that in the age of mechanical reproduction, it preserves an unrepeatable aura of time that would otherwise slip away.
The existence of "Ning Gaze" is like a laboratory for a "turn in seeing," dismantling the inherent paradigms of photographic art through the dimension of light and shadow. As a Chinese-Canadian artist and explorer and practitioner of cross-cultural vision, Ning Li's gazing, capturing, deconstructing, and reconstructing of light and shadow — along with her artistic creation and presentation — is like an experiment that opens up a matrix of time. This artistic unfolding, this cutting-across of fields, is, as Benjamin put it, a way of "linking the visible and the invisible, the instant and the eternal, East and West, in new and unfamiliar ways."
Opening: April 25, 2026, 15:00
Exhibition dates: April 25 – June 15, 2026
Curator: Fu Liming
Host/Organizer: Xu Liaoyuan Museum of Modern Design Art
Co-organizers:
Chengdu Wuyiwu Cultural Communication
XLY MoMA
LIPONT GALLERY
KIA Contemporary
EAST WEST Art Guide Center
Future Art Center Vancouver
Chengdu Wuyiwu Cultural Communication
XLY MoMA
LIPONT GALLERY
KIA Contemporary
EAST WEST Art Guide Center
Future Art Center Vancouver
Artist: Ning Li
Exhibition venue:
Chengdu, China · Xu Liaoyuan Museum · New Art Experimental Center, 1F
Chengdu, China · Xu Liaoyuan Museum · New Art Experimental Center, 1F
Artist' website: https://ningli.ca/
