Year 222

In 2022, during the period of isolation in Shanghai under COVID restrictions, Sai Li developed a body of abstract paintings composed of lines and fields of colour. Made on paper, the works translate time into a language of accumulation under pressure. Working in a closed and isolated environment, the artist painted daily, allowing shifting emotional states to accumulate, layer, and fold into one another over time. Each painting becomes a condensed field in which time and emotion are no longer sequential, but interwoven—hope and despair, rage, collapse, and fragile anticipation traced through gesture, density, and chromatic pressure. Time gradually loses its linear structure, becoming dense and suspended. Within each work, daily emotional states are folded into a single pictorial space, where duration is experienced as simultaneity rather than progression.

76 x 105 cm ; Mix media on paper