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Xinyu Li
LONDON
Xinyu is a Chinese artist based in London, and is currently a practice-based PhD candidate at the University of the Arts London. Her artistic research is grounded in ruins—particularly forgotten dwellings and villages.
Xinyu Li is a Chinese art researcher based in London and a PhD candidate at the University of the Arts London (UAL). She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her practice-led research investigates the spatial and psychological conditions generated by ruination, with particular attention to how abandoned architectures mediate memory, diaspora, and disrupted urban futures. Combining autoethnography, site-walking, and visual methods, Xinyu examines ruins as speculative infrastructures where stalled planning, personal aspiration, and cultural memory collide.
Her independent publishing grows out of her ruins-based practice and research. It documents, in stages, the psychological displacement triggered by decay.
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Publications
Yet it Remains (2026)
ISBN–ISBN 978-1-906908-96-6
This is a photography book about ruins. It gathers traces left by a group of active urbexers (urban explorers) as they enter forgotten sites across China.
These industrial shells, cast aside in the rush of urbanThese industrial shells, cast aside in the rush of urban development, each meet a different fate: some are sealed behind fences and guards; some have already collapsed, gone without a trace; some are pierced through by nature, slowly rotting and breaking down.
Aliens (2024)
Alien, a creature from a foreign land, is filled with fear and uncertainty, yet brimming with curiosity and a desire to explore.
This project was created at the critical juncture of leaving mainland China.During this time, a strange sense of powerlessness and unfamiliarity heightened my doubts — how does a lonely traveller in academic art dissolve the displacement both geographically and psychologically?
Inspired by the various meanings of “Alien,” I began to imagine and interpret what it means to be a foreigner from my subjective and biased perspective.
Jinshi (2026)
This book is the printed version of Jinshi, a semi-documentary film completed by Xinyu Li in 2026. The story begins in 2022, when the artist accompanied her grandfather on his final return to a remote Hakka village to visit the family graves; it ends in 2026, when the family carries his ashes back to the village and lays them to rest in the ancestral cemetery.
One funeral leading to another, a slow and unbroken thread runs through the work. Following this thread, the artist moves through the desolate ruins of the Hakka region, lingering and searching among houses, ancestral halls, theatres, schools, and factories. From these fractured and silent remains, she attempts to glimpse a hidden corner of displacement and gradual decline in the Hakka areas of Guangdong.
Illusions of Decay (2024)
Those fading memories,
Eerie yet not horrific,
Damp yet not frosty,
Sorrow yet not clinging.
