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
The term “paraphernalia” originally referred to items “not included in the dowry” – property belonging solely to the woman, and not to her husband. Nowadays the term is used to describe equipment, devices, and items associated with a certain activity. In the exhibit, the artist Li Chen seeks to return to the original meaning of the word in order to underline the tension concealed in items especially reserved for a man or a woman: items associated with a man’s daily routine in Judaism or items associated with the feminine day-to-day grooming ritual. All these relate to private narratives, ritualism, faith, and gender issues such as cultural perceptions of femininity and the feminine ideal, religion, and masculinity. Furthermore, the individual’s weakness may be identified within these items; his/her submission and dependence on social edicts.

Photos by Li Chen 

Li Chen’s father is a central, meaningful figure in her life. He is a present, caring and attentive father. Her childhood environment was the sign factory he managed. There, he demonstrated and explained with endless patience about the work, the materials, the neon signs, the sheet metal and the plexiglass (in the 1990s he produced the guitar for the. Hardrock Café at Dizengoff Center). ֿThe passion for working with materials is a multigenerational legacy. Her grandfather taught her father welding and how to work with sculptural materials, molds and casts. During her studies in the Department of Ceramics and Glass Design at Bezalel, her father helped her create letters, boxes, and frames, as well as helped with the installation of exhibitions. Over the years, Chen collected sentences he would repeat and notes he would leave for her before he went to work: “Stop buying tights, but don’t save on anything connected to your art.” “I fixed your car.” “I bought you fish and a few things.” “I can’t sleep because of you.” “Enough”. “Come home.” “You got your grandfather’s hands.” “You are my whole world.” “The world sucks, stop taking things personally.” “My whole life he has been beside me, making sure I have everything I need. He asks, shows interest, helps and blurts out caring sentences which are sometimes even annoying but usually funny,” says Chen. His words are so much a part of her it is as if they are tattooed on her skin. The flexible character, texture, and colour of the latex material in her works are reminiscent of human skin and represent the essence of their close relationship. The words are imprinted on the material as a reminder that references the sign factory. Positioning the work in the form of a blanket and a floor lamp are reminiscent of a warm,well-lit home. Her father named her “Li-at” after his own mother Leah. At the age of 20, she shortened her name to “Li”, as a symbolic act of embarking on her own independent path.

The exhibition Our Father is a tribute to Ruty Chinsky-Amitay, who was taken from this world tragically in January 2024, when she was at the pinnacle of her research at the Cité art residency in Paris. Ruty worked on this tender and delicate exhibition, which deals with relationships between fathers and daughters, throughout the last year of her life. After her death, Ruty’s life partner Ofer entrusted me with the list of artists and artworks Ruty had selected some time before, as well as her notes, which included references to articles and psychoanalytical sources which discuss the relationships between daughters and fathers and the appearance of these familial relationships in mythology. Ruty’s curatorial craft was cut short horrifically. In the notes provided to me, Ruty jotted down a single line containing several guiding questions that hint at her curatorial intentions: “To what extent did the relationships between daughters and fathers influence and dictate their art? In what way? What was overt and what was covert? What was the definitive moment? Sometimes these are things that become clear at a later stage.” What were Ruty’s thoughts and where did she plan to point the thematic spotlight? I will never know for sure. My conversations with the artists revealed a variety of father-daughter relationships. What they all had in common were similar characteristics of paternal presence/absence in their lives, as well as their context within worldwide societal and cultural conceptions. Thus, I embarked on a journey of study led by the question: What is fatherhood?

"Our Father" Group Exhibition

Curators: The late Ruty Chinsky-Amitay and Rotem Ritov

Zuzu Gallery - www.zuzugallery.com

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

Neon

Must/Need, 2019
Glass, neon

H.20, w. 130

Currently exhibited at the Crafts and Design Biennale 2020/21 Eretz Israel Museum, Tel-Aviv.

Li Chen's work addresses the paradoxes of the human condition by relying on irony and wordplay. Inspired by their hypnotic aura, the work's message is communicated through the flashing commercial medium of neon signs. Offering her words and takings them away by lighting them up in a pulsing cycle, Li Chen incessantly evokes and replaces meaning.

© Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv