BE SEEN / Xianzhuyue Li
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Opening Times 10am - 6pm
Xianzhuyue Li is a London-based photographer and visual artist whose work engages with social margins, boundaries, and environmental justice. Their practice begins with field research: spending time on site, listening, observing daily life, and building relationships with communities. From there, Li employs a precise visual language and restrained, deliberate compositions to translate invisible structures into narratives that resonate on a human level—making the concept visible, tangible, and relatable.
This series of photographs explores the connection between death, beauty, and social margins. Each composition weaves the stark delicacy of the bird forms into the raw, graphic textures of the moorland, creating a dialogue about life, death, natural environment, and prompting the audience to consider the social margins.
The work’s first layer of meaning is a direct reckoning with death. It lays bare environmental fragility and wildlife’s vulnerability to climate change and human activity, reminding us of the irreversible costs of ecological imbalance.
However, the spread of dead birds across the Skomer island points to a deeper metaphor. Death happens at the edges as well as at the centre. Yet what tends to be recorded are the remains at the centre, while those at the edges fade without trace. That absence mirrors the fate of things at society’s margins: without notice or record, they are quietly erased. By contrast, deaths at the “centre” are seen and remembered. This asymmetry speaks to ecological fragility and to the condition of being unseen—a neglect that can be crueller than death itself.
There is a historical echo within these images—a parallel to the Victorian artists who painted elaborate still lifes featuring dead game and birds in Romantic, symbolic ways as an aesthetic response to life’s fragility, and this photographic series both continues and reworks that tradition.
An overhead viewpoint may suggest power, but the work was made with the artist bent low, close to the ground. The posture reads more as a brief salute or act of mourning than an assertion of control. As such, these images form a twofold elegy: they mourn the vulnerability of wildlife under climate change, and they remind us that life at the margins is fading into silence—a loss that most warrants reflection.