3 July 2026

Artist Highlight - Xinchen Li

Interview and Review

Xinchen Li is a jewellery artist and sculptor from China, currently based in the United States. Evolving from small-scale wearables to immersive installations, her work navigates memory, migration, and cultural identity. She has exhibited internationally at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and Munich Jewelry Week. Her accolades include the Women's Jewelry Association June Herman Scholarship, The ALL Prize, and winning the Mixed Media Category at the 38th Materials: Hard + Soft International Contemporary Craft Competition. Her work is featured in Vogue China, Create! Magazine, and the Jewelry and Metalsmithing Survey.

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ARTIST INTERVIEW

1. The Neck Piece is constructed line by line using a 3D printing pen. How does this drawing-in-space process shape the structure and character of the work?

Building line-by-line turns the 3D pen into a tool for drawing directly in three dimensions. The piece grows organically, allowing decisions about density and contour to happen in the moment. Afterward, I refined the form with a heat gun. Ultimately, this process ensures every filament serves as both a structural member and a visible mark of creation.

2. The transparent PLA material gives the piece a sense of weightlessness. What interests you about creating forms that appear present yet almost immaterial?

I am fascinated by how translucence stages presence without mass. Transparent PLA lets light pass through, casting shadows that function as a second surface, which makes the work both object and echo. This duality mirrors the nature of memory itself: feeling simultaneously solid yet entirely insubstantial. By withholding opacity, I invite viewers to complete the work with their attention. It asks them to notice how true presence can be felt through light, contour, and fragile structure, rather than physical bulk.

3. The layered lines resemble thread, breath, or scaffolding. How do these visual references connect to the themes of memory and displacement in your practice?

Thread, breath, and scaffolding represent different ways of holding personal history. Thread implies mending and domestic craft; breath is a transient trace of living presence; scaffolding provides provisional support for movement and passage. Together, they illustrate how memory and the experience of displacement are sustained by delicate systems that simultaneously protect and expose us. My work maps these modes of holding, visually demonstrating how continuity and vulnerability coexist within our shifting identities.

4. The slow, repetitive making process records the gestures of the hand. How important is the visibility of labour within the final form?

The visibility of labor is essential to my practice. Repetition, small repairs, and uneven rhythms are tangible evidence of time and care. By keeping these elements visible, the act of making becomes central to the work's meaning. These traces resist an anonymous, mass-produced aesthetic, instead archiving attention and persistence. When labor is legible, the object holds a narrative. It allows viewers to read the process as a record of endurance, choices, and repair, rather than viewing it as a neutral, polished commodity.

5. The work sits between jewellery, sculpture, and spatial drawing. How does this hybrid quality influence the way the piece is experienced on the body?

On the body, the piece exists as a complete, structured form. Off the body, it transforms into a suspended spatial drawing or an intimate sculpture. This hybridity invites entirely different modes of attention. It foregrounds personal intimacy while simultaneously opening the work up to public display.

6. Silver foil and silver elements appear within the delicate PLA structure. How do these contrasting materials affect the perception of the work?

Metal punctuates the translucent PLA with reflection and weight. The silver elements act as focal points, suggesting concepts of repair, heirloom value. This material contrast clarifies scale and gesture by providing the fragile filaments with moments of solid resistance. Furthermore, the reflective surfaces change how light interacts with the piece, producing bright highlights and deeper shadows that beautifully complicate the relationship between delicate fragility and lasting endurance.

7. Your practice often explores inherited craft languages through contemporary technology. How does the 3D printing pen allow you to bridge these two approaches?

Because the 3D pen is handheld and slow, it preserves the stitch-like rhythm and deliberate decision-making of traditional domestic crafts. However, the material logic of PLA permits larger scales, suspension, and structural experiments that would be impossible with thread alone. This tool keeps the hand central to the process while offering a completely new vocabulary for form and space. Ultimately, it creates a meaningful continuity with inherited craft languages rather than simply replacing them with contemporary tech.

A STRUCTURE HELD BY BREATH

Review by Chih-Yang Chen, Art Director

Xinchen Li’s work hovers in a peculiar state of existence, as if it has only just arrived and might just as easily dissolve. It does not declare itself with weight or solidity. Instead, it lingers, like a trace that refuses to disappear. Constructed line by line with a 3D printing pen, the piece operates somewhere between drawing and building. Each filament is both structure and gesture, a mark that holds itself in space. There is no clear distinction between skeleton and surface. What you see is what holds it together. The act of making is not hidden beneath refinement; it remains exposed, quietly insistent. The transparency of PLA introduces a subtle tension. The object is undeniably present, yet it resists being fully grasped. Light passes through it, slipping between its lines, casting shadows that feel as significant as the form itself. These shadows behave like echoes, doubling the work, extending it beyond its physical limits. The piece becomes less of a fixed object and more of a shifting condition. This interplay between presence and absence sits at the core of Xinchen’s practice. The structure resembles thread, breath, scaffolding, each suggesting a different way of holding something fragile. Thread mends, breath marks a fleeting moment, scaffolding supports something not yet complete. Together, they form a language of instability, one that reflects the experience of memory and displacement not as something resolved, but as something continuously negotiated. There is an intimacy in the way the work is built. The slow, repetitive process leaves behind subtle irregularities, small adjustments, moments of hesitation. These are not corrected. They are kept. In doing so, the work resists the smooth anonymity of digital fabrication. The 3D pen, often associated with precision, becomes instead a tool of vulnerability, closer to stitching than printing. When worn, the piece gathers itself into a contained form, wrapping around the body with a quiet precision. Off the body, it opens up, becoming a spatial drawing, a suspended architecture of lines. This shift is crucial. It allows the work to move between private and public, between something held and something observed. It never settles into a single identity. The introduction of silver elements punctuates this delicate structure. Where the PLA is light and almost immaterial, the metal asserts a different kind of presence. It reflects, anchors, interrupts. These moments of density act like points of memory, fragments that resist fading. They suggest repair, inheritance, and value, not as fixed ideas, but as interruptions within a fragile system. What Xinchen achieves is not a reconciliation between tradition and technology, but a quiet negotiation. The rhythm of hand-making persists, even as the material language shifts. The work carries the logic of stitching, of accumulation, of care, but extends it into space in ways that feel newly possible. There is no attempt to resolve the tension between fragility and endurance. Instead, the work holds both, allowing them to coexist without hierarchy. Xinchen Li does not construct objects in the conventional sense. She constructs conditions. Structures that breathe, hesitate, and remain, just barely, in place.