Archive of work by graduates from the renowned MFA Programme at GSA

Angelia Li

Angelia is a multidisciplinary artist working across moving image, installation, performance, sculpture, and textile-based practice. Her work often begins with familiar objects, bodily gestures, folk symbols, or childhood memories, then transforms them into strange theatrical situations. Through this process of defamiliarization, she explores how tenderness, fear, violence, ritual, and desire can coexist within the same image.

Angelia is particularly interested in the unstable boundary between the human and the non-human. Animals, toys, masks, mechanical bodies, and ritual objects frequently appear in her work as ambiguous figures: they may seem protective, humorous, vulnerable, or threatening at the same time. By staging these figures within carefully constructed environments, she creates spaces where ordinary perception is interrupted and emotional logic becomes more important than realism.

Her practice combines poetic narrative with material experimentation. She often uses repetition, low-tech mechanisms, sound, fabric, and symbolic arrangements to build small worlds that feel both playful and unsettling. Rather than telling a clear story, Angelia’s works invite the viewer into a suspended moment, where memory, myth, and bodily sensation slowly unfold. Through this ambiguity, she seeks to make hidden emotional structures visible and to question how we understand protection, control, transformation, and the fear of death.