Hong Kong-based artist Melody Qingmei Li explores skin as both subject and medium in her multimedia practice, which includes painting-sculptures, collages, and video works. Her solo exhibition “my gaze is as clear as your breath” at Square Street Gallery in 2025 featured pieces such as “in fragments, seeking flickers” and “touching you in hollow cracks,” where delicate silk and mineral-pigment collages were mounted on custom mirrors to create endless self-examination. Li also led workshops titled “The Body Map Experience” at HART Haus, documented in the two-channel video “to see is to touch to care is to mutate is to be” (2025).
Li’s work matters because it addresses the body’s mutable relationship to the world, a theme heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic when touch became fraught. By blending organic and artificial materials—incense ash, dried flowers, stainless steel, magnets—she dissolves boundaries between human and nonhuman, offering a hybrid mode of existence. Her practice resonates with contemporary conversations about identity, embodiment, and care, positioning her as a distinctive voice in Hong Kong’s art scene.