Li Jun’s paintings are organized around a sense of suspension, a fascination with how objects continue to exist in the absence of humans. In her work, objects, partial bodies, and spatial structures recur, forming relationships that both contain and constrain. These elements function simultaneously as vessels and as boundaries: they receive emotion while delaying its direction. The things she paints carry histories, of use, of association, of circulation within visual culture. But in her paintings, they are suspended from those histories, growing within relations that generate pressure without resolving into narrative. This growth happens inside a particular space, an interior world shaped by her experience as a woman, by the overlapping of Eastern and Western visual traditions, and by the histories of cultural exchange and power that run through both. The figure is about to leave, has just left, or exists only as the pressure an absence exerts on a room. These spaces do not illustrate experience, they are the shape experience takes, holding inherited visual conventions at a distance close enough to recognize, yet strange enough to unsettle. Her paintings do not explain this process. They are the process.

Li Jun (b. 1994, Changsha, China) completed her studies at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and is currently pursuing studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she works in the class of Daniel Richter. Recent presentations include exhibitions at Zeller van Almsick, Vienna; Gene Gallery, Shanghai; ZÉRUÌ, London; and Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (all 2025), as well as multiple exhibitions at Turn Gallery, New York (2021, 2022, 2024, and 2025). Li Jun is represented by Zeller van Almsick in Vienna. Her work has been recognized with grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2024, 2026).