Self-portraits, 2022

Sai Li's self-portraits never take the form of her own image. One winter, at a Christkindmarkt, she encountered a carousel unicorn. Among the painted horses, it seemed quietly out of place. Its finely drawn eyeliner carried an unexpected elegance—at once gentle, self-possessed, and strangely familiar. She recognized herself in it. Through the unicorn, Sai Li adopts a position just outside herself—a consciousness from which seeing becomes possible. Here, the self-portrait is freed from likeness. It becomes a space where identity emerges through perception, distance, and time. For Sai Li, a self-portrait is not the depiction of a face, but the search for a form capable of holding an inner life. The unicorn became that form—a silent witness through which the self comes into view. Across the series, Sai Li reflects on memory, mortality, and the passage of time. Graves, reflections on water, and forms of sprouting life recur as motifs, alongside rain, floral spirals, sunlight, and trees emerging from the body. Life and death are held within a shared simultaneity.