Mixed media: Polymer plaster, epoxy putty, cast rubber snake, oil and pigment paint.

180hX50w cm

Moral Purity explores the lasting impact of childhood trauma and social exclusion on the body and identity. A black snake coils around a ballerina’s leg, transforming a symbol of innocence, discipline, and grace into an image of vulnerability and constraint. Through this metamorphosis, the work reveals how emotional wounds become embedded in the body, persisting long after the original experience has passed.

“Aviya's Summer”, a group exhibition exploring bullying and social exclusion.

Curator: Guy Morag

Producer: Keren Shpilsher

Contemporary Art Gallery, Ramat Hasharon, Israel, 2026.

Solo Exhibition

By5 Gallery, September 2025

Curator Nir Harmat

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.

"Paraphernalia" Solo Exhibition, 2017
Almacen Gallery Tel-Aviv Jaffa, Israel
Paraphernalia, 2017
Solo Exhibition

The term Paraphernalia originally referred to possessions belonging exclusively to a woman, outside her dowry and beyond her husband's ownership.

In this exhibition, Li Chen revisits the term's historical meaning to explore the relationship between gender, ritual, identity, and social conventions. Working predominantly with glass, she transforms objects associated with Jewish male religious practices and women's daily beauty rituals, examining the cultural construction of femininity and masculinity.

The fragility and transparency of glass contrast with the rigidity of religious and social conventions. Through the juxtaposition of sacred objects and everyday instruments of grooming, the works reveal tensions between personal identity and collective expectations, questioning how rituals, beliefs, and ideals of beauty shape the individual.

Vanity, 2025
Mixed media: Hand-sculpted polymer plaster, hand-sewn fabric, oil paint, wood
60 × 40 cm

Liminis, BY5 Gallery, Tel Aviv
Curator: Nir Harmat

Inspired by antique portrait brooches and classical reliefs, Vanity transforms intimate decorative objects into enlarged sculptural portraits. Each figure is individually sculpted by hand in polymer plaster and painted in oils, incorporating meticulously hand-sewn Victorian-inspired collars. Combining traditional craftsmanship, historical fashion, and idealized feminine imagery, the works explore beauty, ornamentation, and the cultural construction of femininity.

21-26 May 2025

Zemack Contemporary Art Gallery

Analog Photography
London, UK
60 × 90 cm

Concept, artistic direction and performance: Li Chen
Photography: Felix Baumsteiger

Created in London at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, On the Fence marks the starting point of a personal and artistic journey through a rapidly changing reality.

Suspended between movement and stillness, the figure occupies a threshold between the familiar and the unknown. The red shoes, white stockings, and fragmented body suggest a moment of transition, where identity, place, and perception become uncertain.

The photograph preceded the development of Iron Girl, a photographic series exploring transformation, identity, and the experience of navigating unfamiliar environments.

2020–2022

Performative Self-Portraiture, Staged Analog Photography

Concept, artistic direction and performance: Li Chen
Photography in collaboration with Felix Baumsteiger

Iron Girl vs Travel Ban 1-0 emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, as borders closed and freedom of movement became increasingly restricted.

While travelling through Europe, Li Chen discovered a discarded children's Iron Man mask beneath a rubbish bin on the nearly deserted streets of London. The found object became the starting point for an ongoing performative photographic series in which the artist inhabits an alter ego, Iron Girl.

Moving between urban landscapes, domestic interiors and natural environments, Iron Girl appears as an anonymous, displaced figure, simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. The superhero mask conceals individual identity while creating a new one, challenging conventional representations of femininity, heroism and freedom.

Through staged encounters with unfamiliar places, the series explores the tension between personal autonomy and external restrictions, transforming a period of global uncertainty into an exploration of identity, resilience and the desire to move freely.

Tefillin

Israeli Glass biennale 2015
״Chen's expressive artistic interventions in two undeniable emblems of Jewish ancestry- a pair of corroding iron handcuffs attached to the leather straps of tefillin, and a leather whip with eight twined a knotted strands attached to the tzitzit(instead of the tzitzit's eight tassels) - convey personal insights about the controversial educational methods and the authoritative way in which religious world views are disseminated״

Henrietta Eliezer Brunner - Curator of Glass pavilion at The Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv.

Photo by : Leonid Padrul, © Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv

Israeli Glass biennale 2015 

"Chen's minimalist installation addresses personal narratives related to issues of femininity and gender roles. Paraphernalia, from ordinary daily beauty-care routine,and household chores are translated into meticulously crafted glass objects and placed within their natural habitat. yet, this habitat is transformed into a cold, lifeless, and alienated setting of surgical sterility" 

Henrietta Eliezer Brunner | Curator of Glass at The Eretz Israel Museum | Tel Aviv.

Frog Kiss, 2013/15
Graduation Project. Dept of Ceramic & Glass Design Bezalel, Jerusalem.

Exhibited at the Israeli Glass biennale Biennale, 2015

Eretz Israel Museum, Tel-Aviv.

"Chen's minimalist installation addresses personal narratives related to issues of femininity and gender roles. Paraphernalia, from ordinary daily beauty-care routine, and household chores are translated into meticulously crafted glass objects and placed within their natural habitat. yet, this habitat is transformed into a cold, lifeless, and alienated setting of surgical sterility" 

Henrietta Eliezer Brunner - Curator of Glass pavilion at The Eretz Israel Museum , Tel-Aviv

Ruffle collar/ Dress - Handmade

Analog Photography

Maastricht NL, 2021

Faceless Sewn Dolls, 2023-2025

Hand-sewn painter’s canvas, waxed thread, mixed media
*Dimensions variable

Faceless Sewn Dolls explores the physical and psychological dimensions of the human body through a series of fictional, faceless figures, meticulously hand-stitched from painter’s canvas in a muted palette.

Drawing on fashion mannequins, classical portraiture, medical models, prosthetics, and robotics, the figures exist between the human and the artificial, the familiar and the uncanny.

Their exaggerated collars, inspired by classical paintings, evoke wealth and aristocratic status while simultaneously suggesting restraint and suffocation. The raw canvas functions as a pale, exposed skin-a fragile membrane enclosing bodies stripped of individual identity.

Echoing both the mythical Golem of Prague and contemporary visions of human cloning, the sculptures question the boundaries between body and object, individuality and uniformity, vulnerability and control.

Non-narrative video work By Li Chen & Gregori Zilber draws parallels between the physical and metaphorical qualities of glass and the treacherous world of interpersonal relationships.
In four vignettes, we view the artists romp, rage, and regroup in Surreal landscape that is revealed, upon closer inspection, to be acres of broken glass.
Each fresh from a difficult breakup, the artists are seen commiserating in this strangely beautiful setting, itself a portrait non only of the artists as they struggle against their self-destructive nature, but of the material in which they choose to work.

New Glass from Israel /March 21st – May 5th, 2018

Group exhibition"Unresolved" (Issues) Urban Glass, Brooklyn NY 
Curated by Jennifer-Navva Milliken

Eretz Israel Museum, Tel-Aviv, April 16th, 2020/21
Curated by Henrietta Brunner

Dolls

"Bubot" (Dolls), 2018

Li Chen's "Dolls" piece, created especially for the exhibition "Shop It!," is an intriguing variation of the Barbie character.
Berlinsky tells the family story behind the work: "My grandfather was a metalworker and an artist. He used to buy sculptures and replicate them in molds that he created. He stored them in the drawers of the house, while my grandmother secretly distributed them and contemptuously called them "dolls" Chen's took the statue of Venus, one of the "dolls" her grandfather had bought in the flea market, created a mold and duplicated her "Dolls."

A packing factory agreed to create the white and "Barbie-pink" display boxes for the artist. 
In the museum display, the dolls' boxes are stacked on top of each other in a cube on a wooden palette, as in the preparation for wholesale shipping. Chen's, whose previous works dealt with the grooming routine of a young woman, often engages with the subjects of beauty and the attempts to achieve it. 
The artist notes that she made sure to leave in each of the dolls a small defect that would emphasize the manual production of the dolls.

SHOP IT! Haifa Museum of Art
Curated by Svetlana Reingold

Photos: Noa Flecker © Haifa Museum of Art