Zhongkai Li

2026
2025
2024
2023
2022
2021

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Zhongkai Li is a New York-based artist and educator. His recent paintings explore shifting states of mind through color, gesture, and space. Working with watercolor, ink, and earth pigments on unprimed canvas, he allows water to spread and settle, responding with spontaneous marks that move between painting, sketch, and stain. His intuitive use of water draws on memories of the river landscapes of his birthplace in southern China. As an immigrant who has lived between places for years, he understands distance as something felt in the body, creating images that hover between abstraction and representation, both intimate and unfamiliar.

Li’s work has been presented internationally in exhibitions, screenings, and design contexts. Recent presentations include Tone in Tongue at Letterform Archive (San Francisco, 2026), tête-à-tête at Milan Design Week (Milan, 2026), The Garden, Marvelous and Metallic at Accent Sisters (New York, 2025), Stranger Things at Here Gallery (Pittsburgh, 2022). Solo exhibitions and projects include Drifting Fragments at Upper Iowa University (2022), Prototype I at IS A GALLERY (Shanghai, 2021), and Finding Patterns in Time and Place at Maharam (New York, 2019).

Alongside his studio practice, Li has developed community-based initiatives that bring artists, designers, and scholars into dialogue. He co-founded Radical Characters, an educational and curatorial platform exploring language and visual culture through collaborations across Asia and the United States. From 2021 to 2025, Li directed IS A Gallery, an alternative art space in Shanghai, where he organized exhibitions and published books. 

Originally trained as a graphic designer, Li developed his painting practice independently. He recently taught visual language and cross-lingual typography at Pratt Institute and previously worked at Parsons School of Design, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery. Li holds a BFA in Visual Communication from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University.




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