Li Chenchi: Man With Good Taste

Part of Fotografiska’s Emerging Artist Program, Fotografiska Shanghai presents the opening of a brand-new solo exhibition Man With Good Taste featuring works by contemporary artist Li Chenchi on June 19. Centered on the artist’s signature aesthetic of “in-betweenness”, the exhibition responds to the current era of image proliferation, accelerated visual consumption and fragmented attention. Through a diverse spectrum of cross-medium visual creations, it builds a meditative field for slowed-down observation and intensified perception between the mundane and the sacred, personal memory and grand history, as well as poetic tenderness and structural fragmentation.

While taste is commonly regarded as a mere matter of personal aesthetic preference, Li Chenchi proposes that aesthetic judgment is never individual or arbitrary. It is a profound evaluation system embedded within social stratification and visual politics. The binary distinction between “good” and “bad” in aesthetics is not a simple reversal of values, but a description of an illusory, fleeting, and threshold-like moment of ambiguity. This unique liminal state serves as the core thread running through Li Chenchi’s practice, and constitutes his primary artistic reflection in resisting fast-food-style visual consumption.

Experimenting intricately with texture, tone, imagery, and material interplay, Li has developed a highly malleable creative methodology. Merging the expressive languages of painting, photography, and printmaking, his works adopt layered pigmentation, superimposition, and collage techniques. Moving beyond straightforward narrative representation, his visual layers traverse dual boundaries: the ordinary and the transcendental, individual recollection and historical narration. Each piece transcends flat documentation, constructing a contemplative visual field that slows down and redirects the viewer’s gaze.

Showcasing the artist’s diverse experimental approaches to borderline aesthetics, this solo exhibition offers a profound reflection on how we see and interpret images today. Within Li’s immersive visual field, viewers are invited to slow down, shift their perspective, and rediscover the profound power of images — the hidden poetry within fragmentation and the quiet divinity embedded in ordinary life.