Li Jhao Ci (b. 1994, Taitung, Taiwan)
Li’s practice is inspired by foreign literary texts—particularly Russian and Latin American novels that depict the complexities of nationhood, war, and colonial history. Through these influences, he reflects on Taiwan’s own geopolitical condition. Working across painting, installation, and poetry, Li explores the tensions between the individual and the collective, as well as the conflicts between faith and interest. His works often adopt a tone of irony, satire, and metaphor to respond to Taiwan’s contemporary political discourse.

Having cultivated cacti for nearly a decade, Li draws metaphorical connections between these foreign plants and notions of outsiders, invasion, transplantation, and grafting. The cactus serves as a primary material in his installations, where different species are grafted together to form deformed communities—symbolizing Taiwan as an “imagined community” pieced together from both Eastern and Western concepts and multiple national identities. Beneath this composition lies a sense of collective anxiety, suspended between self-identification and the recognition imposed by external powers.

Cacti, armed with thorns, evolve their defenses to survive in harsh environments. Once transformed through art, these grafted and displaced species—removed from soil and turned into display objects—become metaphors for drifting, bare life, and the objectification of living beings. In his solo exhibition Wanting to Hook Some Trees and Birds (2024), the cactus first appeared as a weapon-like or scepter-like form, wavering between aggression and resistance. The moral judgment surrounding it extends beyond biological nature, delving instead into collective narratives and the manipulation of consciousness.

Li’s installations, paintings, and poetry form an intertextual world. In his paintings, recurring symbols such as houses, dogs, and phallic shapes are layered and reassembled to highlight the conflict between power, systems, and individual shelter. The use of sand and gravel gives the canvas the texture of an archaeological relic, contrasting sharply with childlike graffiti—like a harmless joke that conceals latent violence. In his solo exhibition The King’s Tail is a Donkey’s Tail (2025), Li reimagines mythological tales as absurd political allegories, exploring the interplay between collective politics, humans and animals, and the notions of home and nation.

This symbolic operation also extends into Li’s poetry. In his self-published zines Contemporary Dog Eats Its Own Fur and Anti-Contemporary Dog Review Collection, he employs misplacement and associative writing, combining text and image to weave a network of narratives across installation, painting, and language. He questions how different narrative media—found objects, images, and text—affect the reading of symbols. In all three mediums, titling plays a crucial role: it functions not merely as description but as deliberate misdirection, shaping how information is interpreted. Between concealment and revelation, humor and seriousness, Li invites viewers to misread his symbols—so that, through the process of decoding, they enter another world of self-projection, forming multiple grafted narratives between individuals.