OFFICE|Magician Space Shenzhen|Li Li Ren: The World Forgetting by the World Forgot

OFFICE

Founded in 2025, OFFICE is Magician Space’s liaison outpost in Shenzhen. With the Greater Bay Area as its point of engagement, OFFICE develops and facilitates contemporary art practices and cultural exchange across the southern region.

The World Forgetting by the World Forgot

Li Li Ren

Date: 2026.03.18–07.18

Hours: Tues–Sat 13:00–18:00

*Reservation required one day in advance via WeChat.

Venue:

Room 1203, Wanxia Centre, Shekou, Nanshan District, Shenzhen

Li Li Ren has been bidding farewell to language in recent years.

This distance makes her sculptures seem remote—as though they arrive prior to language, earlier even than the notion of “time.” We sense a quiet melancholy in this abandonment of language, of the well-ordered world, and of our recognition of the self.

Let us imagine a world in which “you” and “I” are tightly bound together—a world disregards the chaos in between. Perhaps this marks her first moment of remembrance. In this sense, learning language becomes a mode of forgetting the self.

(How might the pre-linguistic world be elaborated?)

According to Li Li,

Meanings flow according to repeating rhythms,

while lives are composed of shifting matter, supporting and sustaining one another.

As language withdraws, we are once again reminded of the structures and traces of matter—the marks of where matter begins.

About the artist

Li Li Ren (b. 1986, Heilongjiang, China) lives and works in London, where she gained her BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in 2010, and her MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2017. 

Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Sherbet Green (London), Magician Space (Beijing) and Qimu Space (Beijing), and was included in exhibitions at YUE Art Museum (Shandong), Yuan Art Museum (Beijing), Palmer Gallery (London), Zéruì Gallery (London), Dulwich Picture Gallery (London), Times Museum (Guangdong), ENNOVA Art Museum (Hebei), Cob Gallery (London), Embassy of the Kingdom of Belgium in Beijing (Beijing), MOCA Yinchuan (Ningxia), Frieze Sculpture (London), X Museum (Beijing), Gravity Art Museum (Beijing), Guardian Art Center (Beijing), Camden Arts Centre (London), etc.