From left to right:

Sunset Pier, 2020
acrylic, charcoal on canvas
55″ x 60″

Shopping District, 2020
chalk, charcoal, oil pastel on paper
48″ x 84″

Chinese Restaurant, 2020
acrylic, charcoal on paper
35″ x 60″

Victor Li’s Shopping District is a memory made physical as he reimagines his hometown in response to the 2020 quarantine. Li reflects on these once lively public spaces becoming abandoned and quiet. Layers of image and medium build onto each other, reassembling a time and place that is both familiar and strange. The buildings recede into abstracted swatches of color, pixelated as though the setting is being built around us. Li’s memories are less a snapshot, and more a collage. He illustrates not only the memory of his home but the building of such a memory, imbuing these places with the raw emotions of nostalgia: both joy from that time and grief for the loss of that reality. 

Victor Li’s work appears in Imperfect In Its Cracks: Fragments Of Memory And Identity.