Zhuyu Li is a Chinese-born, Toronto-based visual artist working with silk, wood, and water-based media. Her practice explores the intersection of industrial form and traditional Chinese aesthetics through abstract compositions. Blurring the boundary between structure and fluidity, her work reflects on spatial standardization, sensory memory, and poetic resistance.
The Reverse Side of Home
Found object (reclaimed wood floorboard from home), approx. 20 x 25 cm, 2025
This group of 3 works are wooden floorboards, removed from my apartment during a recent renovation. What’s shown is its reverse side—normally hidden beneath daily life. It has not been modified or repainted. Its marks, color shifts, and quiet texture are preserved as-is, allowing the surface to speak for itself. As an international student, I have lived between cultures, moving between Shanghai and Toronto. In both places, “home” often feels temporary, unstable, or standardized. This work is a quiet protest against the increasingly homogenized, impersonal spaces shaped by global capitalism—spaces where floors, furniture, and feelings start to look the same. By flipping over this common object and treating it as art, it raises a simple question: what lies beneath what we take for granted? It becomes a threshold, not only in structure, but in meaning. A passage between visibility and obscurity, presence and memory. In the in-betweenness of migration and identity, this plain wooden board offers something grounding: a tangible, silent record of lived space.
