To enter Liminis is to cross a threshold: a space where matter is no longer merely physical, but a stage where memory, image, and consciousness converge. Li Chen weaves a world where reality and imagination entwine, where material becomes a living presence, carrying myth, emotion, and the traces of personal history. Echoing Pygmalion, her figures stir to life, prompting reflections on identity, the body, and the mysterious possibility that an object can open a gateway to inner passage.
The exhibition presents four life-sized gatekeepers: the Moon Woman, the Welder, the Tree-Woman, and the Sewn Robot. Each embodies a boundary—between light and shadow, craft and matter, human and nature, organic and artificial. They are mythic actors, dreamlike sentinels, refusing immediate passage; they ask the viewer to pause, to witness, to recognize the act of crossing.
Gatekeepers appear across cultures: Cerberus at the gates of the underworld, angels and monsters challenging heroes, Persephone straddling life and death. From a Jungian perspective, they symbolize fear and doubt that arrest the journey until readiness arrives. Chen embraces this figure not as a barrier but as an invitation: meeting the gatekeepers is a moment of transformation.
Around them, symbols unfold: shoes tracing contact with the earth, marking the passage from reality to image; a pearl cradled in a shell, hinting at inner listening and growth born of struggle; a keepsake box of archival fragments—stones, shells, shards of sculpture—remnants of a journey; and butterflies floating in the space, reminding us of metamorphosis’s delicacy against matter’s weight.
The figures and objects in Liminis question the essence of beauty: does it dwell in formal perfection, glossy materiality, or rather in flaw, scar, incompleteness? Here the aesthetic collides with the ethical—the seductive image draws desire, yet demands reflection, responsibility, acknowledgment of pain and fracture. Chen places the viewer in a double stance: to luxuriate in the image while contemplating the moral and emotional cost of its creation and perception.
Between mythology and psychology, living matter and elusive image, ancient and contemporary, intimate and epic, Liminis conjures a space where the threshold exists not only at the gate, but within us.