Modern Nature:
Dong Xiaochi &
Effie Wanyi Li
1 - 31 May, 2025
William Hine is pleased to present Modern Nature, a duo exhibition by London-based artists Dong Xiaochi and Effie Wanyi Li, on view from 1 - 31 May, 2025. Throughout each of their practices, both artists reflect on nature, the environment and the human condition, channeling their observations through unique modes of abstraction.
Dong Xiaochi’s practice blends an experimental and conceptual process of contemporary painting with a more traditional application of pigment rooted in classical Chinese painting. In his large-scale works on canvas and mixed-media, shaped panel paintings, Dong finds visual form for observations drawn from nature. Dong’s paintings mirror textures of ecological space and seem to methodically register through shade and shape the passage of time, swell of heat and fragmentation of light. Images saturated with these dense yet minimalist atmospheres are borne of the artist’s personal engagement with landscapes and habitats at different scales, both human and artificial, including botanical gardens and miniature ecosystems. Dong, who himself cultivates and cares for complex plant and amphibian life from his home, is well attuned to the methods and processes required to support and sustain life in a system of terrariums. A long-term engagement with cycles of nutrition, monitoring of temperature and humidity and the building and maintenance of suitable structures for growth provide a paradigm for which the artist’s studio practice is inevitably entangled. The materiality and arrangement of pigment and ground, therefore, are treated with similar care. Surfaces are often primed with akadama soil, methodically applied across the canvas, preparing a base for a pictorial world to emerge. Environments unfold across rippled and fractured patterns of light and dark as black and grey pigment, or monochromatic colour, is slowly set in motion, delineating spaces of activity and rest. The implication of animal or plant-like forms create thresholds and boundaries in which worlds emerge at different scales. In larger format works we see land and sky separate and implications of forests, mountains or lakes seem to rise up, cascading and colliding against more geometric blueprints beneath them. In smaller-scale images, the more minute timbres of life seem to grow and decay; the folds of leaves, churned patterns of soil or the arrangement of drops of condensation register through rhythm, shape and colour. Paint becomes a fertile terrain of its own in which the artist draws on life and nature in diaristic fashion to unfold, explore and speculate on new worlds of his own making.
Whilst Dong’s paintings often articulate a human engagement with the outer world around him, the work of Effie Wanyi Li offers a method into finding form for an internal realm of perception and sensation. Across her canvases are environments that blend both an architectural and biological sensibility, presenting abstract landscapes that visualise inner experiences. In Li’s artistic practice there is a desire to understand the interplay between the body as a physical space and as a carrier of emotion and thought. Li attempts to translate cognitive and embodied experience for which language is not available, into manifest, physical form. Painting becomes a dialogue with the self in which shape, colour and pattern delineate mood and atmospheres. In Li’s recent work, compositions centre around particular ‘trigger points’ that visualise specific sensations and expand and contract from these locations. Her compositions are built up initially in looser washes and more tentative gestures before later gaining firmer shape, rhythm and tonality over a course of weeks and months. Each work reveals the time-based nature of painting, with multiple visits to the surface pushing and pulling the imagery in new directions, reflecting on states that may oscillate between harmony and anxiety in equal measure. Though abstract in their nature, they hint at spaces that are almost tangible, enterable or familiar. Intense environments are built up through positions of contrast, with darkness set against bright sources of light, sharpness combined with softness, dynamic movement with total stillness. Li’s paintings are tense yet balanced, with passages that clash or disturb one another yet resolve into a whole. In this new group of paintings, Li has sought visual analogies for concepts that resonate with traditional Chinese acupuncture, identifying points on the body that allow the release of accumulated tension. Similarly in her painterly compositions, pockets of energy are triggered, released and reorganised, creating flows of movement around the canvas, with forms rippling and overlapping one another in complex arrangements.
Throughout the works in Modern Nature, each artist offers a different perspective and means of engaging with fundamental questions of how to translate lived experience into abstract form, revealing personalised practices that explore how lived experiences become internalised and reinterpreted through the painted image. Through the considered construction and erasure of shape, light and colour, both Li and Dong offer a view of painting as a vehicle to reveal the nature and nurturing of modern life, collapsing the boundaries of human and non-human, external and internal, giving voice and vision to daily life.
About the artists:
Dong Xiaochi (b. 1993, Shanghai, China) lives and works in London. Dong received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2023), MA in Chinese Painting at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts (2018) and BA in Chinese Painting at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include Symbiotic Friend, Hive Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2025) and Petrichor, The Shophouse, Hong Kong (2024). Selected group exhibitions include Supercrowd/Supercommunity, TANK, Shanghai (2024); Delicate Bonds, Lychee One, London (2024); Tender Like Asphalt, Sherbet Green, London (2023) and Return to Nature, Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai (2023).
Effie Wanyi Li (b. 1995, Hainan, China) lives and works in London. Li received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2023) and BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include Yet Always Blooming, T293, Rome (2024). Selected group exhibitions include The Cloud Catcher, Perrotin, Shanghai (2025); Cell Struggles, Foundry, Seoul (2025); Fragments of Reality, VIN VIN, Vienna (2025); Embodied Form: Painting Now, Thaddaeus Ropac, London (2024), Metamorphosis, F2T Gallery, Milan (2024), Embodied Perspective: A Dialogue in Forms, Cadet Capela, Paris (2024) and How Things Hold, T293, Rome (2023).
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Works
Effie Wanyi Li
At Dazhui, 2025
Oil on canvas
180 x 160 cm
Dong Xiaochi
Snare Garden, 2025
Ink, acrylic, pastel and Akadama soil on linen
100 x 85 cm
Dong Xiaochi
Dungeness Moss, 2025
Ink, acrylic and Akadama soil on panel
32 x 49.5 x 3.6 cm
Effie Wanyi Li
Reverberation I, 2025
Oil on canvas
130 x 110 cm
Effie Wanyi Li
Reverberation II, 2025
Oil on canvas
130 x 110 cm
Dong Xiaochi
Monstera, 2025
Ink, Akadama soil on linen
180 x 200 cm
Dong Xiaochi
Dungeness Moss, 2025
Ink, acrylic, pastel, Akadama soil on panel
73 x 77 x 3.6 cm (overall)
each panel: 47 x 56.5 cm (top); 31 x 37 cm (bottom)
Dong Xiaochi
Dungeness Moss, 2025
Ink and Akadama soil on panel
38 x 73.5 x 3.6 cm