Nostalgia Psyche by Keni Li an Exhibition and Book Launch

Keni Li is a China-born photographer currently based in Glasgow, where she is pursuing a PhD at the University of Glasgow. She previously earned a Master’s degree in Modern and Contemporary Art from the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research explores the intersections of photography, literature, and memory writing, with particular focus on photo-text practices, intermediality, women artists and photographers, and cultural memory.

In 2024, she presented the exhibition Memory Photo-booth, funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH). Her artwork has been exhibited in several cities across the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan. She has collaborated with art institutions including the Greek Feminist Autonomous Center and Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh.

Her recent book chapter, Reinventing Contemporary Exhibition Space: Novels, Domestic Space, and Cinematic Cartography, will appear in Exhibition Matters: Contemporary Displays and Exhibition-Making Practices (Bloomsbury, 2025). Her latest photobook, Fluid Memory, is forthcoming.

This exhibition forms another fragment in my ongoing constellation of memory. Following earlier explorations, of objects, of cartographies, of scent—this work turns toward touch, tracing the quiet yet profound relationship between memory and the tactile.

I have sought out objects marked by texture, surfaces that hold, or perhaps awaken, remembrance. Butterflies, toy gem stickers, shards of metal and ceramic, reflective traces: these are the tokens through which memory flickers into being. Often invisible, yet persistently present, they accompany me like a shadow, emerging unbidden, at unexpected moments, in unforeseen places. And yet, when deliberately pursued, they recede, becoming elusive, almost untouchable. They remain fluid, travelling with me across geographies, across shifting identities.

In this project, I extend photography beyond the visual, embedding tactile fragments, ceramic, metal, glass, gemstone, into the surface of each image. These interventions invite touch as a mode of seeing, allowing memory to be encountered not only through the eye, but through the hand. Tangibility becomes a language of recollection.

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