London based visual artist and photographer Zesheng Li’s practice is grounded in a deep sensitivity to natural environments and a meditative approach to image-making. The artist explores liminal time and space, positioning his works at the intersection of spirituality, landscape and the poetics of impermanence. Through stillness, impression, and contemplation, the artist creates images that offer more than they state—what he calls ‘the unseen architectures of experience and images where something lingers, just out of reach, waiting to be quietly recognized.’
Fog and religious iconography are prevalent in his artworks. Yet neither are photographed by the artist to merely reflect a weather condition in landscape nor as a mechanism to conjure dogmatic narratives; rather, they become metaphorical thresholds. In his artworks, fog is a veil blurring the boundaries between the earthly and the divine. Working primarily in natural settings, Zesheng Li avoids what he terms ‘overt intervention’, allowing light, time, and atmosphere to form his compositions. Likewise, religious icons are not meant to be centrepieces within his compositions, but serve as traces of collective memory – cultural echoes through which the sacred continues to flow, even within secular settings. His photographs are not created to dogmatically constrain the spiritual, rather to allow space for it. Assiduously observant, he grasps moments where presence appears to drift between the seen and the sensed.
This is beautifully portrayed in his current work, ‘I, US, THEM’ consisting of 3 black & white photographs hung beside each other horizontally, each of figures walking across bare rural terrain, covered by thick fog. As a key element here, the fog simultaneously conceals and illuminates, dissolving the forms while sharpening our attention. According to the artist, in his artworks, ‘fog becomes a spiritual agent, transforming ordinary scenes into thresholds—where the land becomes memory, and absence becomes presence.’ Through his photography, he crafts spaces of reflection—where meaning is not delivered, but slowly unveiled. These artworks beckon us to engage in deep thought with their visual silence and a veneration of the unstated. As the viewer’s gaze moves slowly back and forth across these 3 images, there arises a gentle anticipation of something about to emerge. As expressed by Zesheng Li, his artwork ‘seeks to reveal the unseen dimensions of landscape and experience—to hold space for the sacred that exists in quiet, liminal moments.’Photography, for him, ‘is not just a visual practice, but a devotional one. It is a way of listening to the world when it has nothing to say aloud.’
