Through the use of colourful illustrations, London-based visual artist, Lin (Ruki) Li, reconsiders the sense of self, space and a person relationship with new environments, far from their origins. Ruki subtly explores her experiencing of the human body through the creation of connections between art and other creative industries, such as illustration, literature and fashion.
Art does allow to combine things, sensations, and words, which sometime and seemingly do not make sense at all. In her newly created digitally series, That is My Face (2024), the cat – as a symbolic animal –, represents the intuitive side opening up to a vast field of conditions exploration femininity and independent spirit. The extensive blue background, involving the cat figure, in contrast, evokes the immateriality and boundlessness of a particular vision of the world. Her illustrations recall Matisse’ attraction for the use of colour and to the delight that those hues transported us into. Ruki’s digital illustrations are drawn like an adult mimicking a child, nervously unfinished. Clearly, she is not afraid of imperfections. Maybe, like everyone else, just afraid of having to navigate between her cultural roots and the customs of her new surrounding; maybe there is a need for playfulness and a move towards possibilities of opening-up.
At first glance, her illustrations appear to be colourful residues reflecting upon the lonely self-transformation and bodily modification one goes through at different moments in one’s life. In That is My Face case those digital intimate works hint at what often seems to be something that does not fit into what is commonly conveyed, or that fits badly. In reality, in reaction to an always in obedience to a closed logical scheme in art, Ruki’s illustrations break with some of the long-established categories in art by rendering and inputting the phenomenological in the digital space.
