Xi Li: to put an image in front of the thing

LATITUDE Gallery is pleased to announce “to Put an Image in Front of the Thing,” a solo exhibition by Xi Li, on view from April 2 through May 3, 2025. This marks the artist’s debut solo exhibition in New York, presenting a new body of photographic works that explore the tension between archival image, memory, and mediated perception. 

This exhibition brings together a new body of silkscreened photographs, each constructed through a layered process of scanning, assembling, and rephotographing archival materials—creating works that hold memory at a remove. Presented below is the artist’s own writing, which serves as the conceptual grounding for the exhibition:

Image-making, for me, begins with the image-seeking. More than before, the pictures I source often had a pronounced past: a living room from a 1937 decorative magazine, the photographic documentation a floral textile print from the Met, the arrival of a new carnation variety. 

The visual fullness, or excess of these pictures often stem from their clearly designated industrial and instructional nature; in other words, the function of image dictates the outcome of the image. I complicate their images’ original functions by scanning, printing, assembling a collaged three-dimensional space. Finally, the camera shutter captures the processes of my decisions and indecisions, forming a new mnemonic image. 

In many ways, the new image indexes the mysterious affinities I feel towards the various source images, and questioning the nature of such affinities. Furthermore, I question what exactly is being brought to light. The one thing I am sure about, however, was the fact that any affinity established between myself and images was the result of a certain alienation and distance. The new images, after all, were born out of the absence of memory. 

“Vorstellung—to put an image in front of the thing, or to make a representation from memory”1 

I think about how the scanner moves in total darkness as the lens “photographs” the source image, yet how a photograph is fundamentally the presence of light: 

How to let the lights (old and new) into the new space? How do light and shadow distribute among themselves on the silkscreened surface of fermented images? How can these spaces breathe? 

The photographs’ passages through lightness and darkness present an opportunity from me to step out of my own subjectivity and observe myself from an intimate distance. 

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1 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/73/60460/the-silence-of-the-lens/ ”