Yushi Li 黎雨詩

Yushi Li (b. 1991, Hunan Province, China) is a Chinese artist who lives and works in London. Her practice is rooted in photography and video, and unfolds through a sustained interrogation of the gaze — its gendered architectures, its erotic charge, and its art-historical inheritance.

Li's work subverts the conventions of Western painting by repositioning the male body as an object of female desire. Drawing on the iconography of Renaissance and Old Master paintings, she stages scenes of vulnerability, pleasure, and fantasy in which the traditionally active male subject becomes the looked-at, the possessed, the consumed. Her signature series — My Tinder Boys, Paintings, Dreams and Love, and Flowers in the Mirror — move between the registers of art history and contemporary digital life, treating the smartphone and the camera as instruments of a new, female-authored erotic vision.

Her photographs resist easy reversal. Rather than simply exchanging roles, Li questions the very structures of desire that art history has encoded — returning again and again to the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious, the theatrical and the intimate. The body in her work is always a site of power and tenderness in equal measure.

She holds an MA in Photography and a PhD in Arts & Humanities from the Royal College of Art, London, where her research has extended her visual enquiry into the theoretical terrain of the gaze, gender, and digital spectatorship. Her work is held in collections including the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung (Munich), the UK Parliament Heritage Collection, and Soho House (London), and has been exhibited across Europe, Asia, and North America.