Entering the Outland

Entering the Outland

No one lives here anymore. 

The architecture still stands in place, beginning to grow according to its own logic. 

Raindrops trickle down the branches into the rooms, penetrating the boundaries that once belonged to human domain. The walls peel away slowly, the roofs tilt, and damp moss fills the fractures. Stepping into these abandoned Hakka dwellings years later, the lingering traces still murmur fragments of past lives. 

Returning to the village, the artist searches for a life repeatedly recounted by her family, yet she never directly experienced. Footsteps forge irregular paths through wild grass; the camera records the exposed openness left by collapse; brushstrokes imagine the words which the ruins long to speak. The sights encountered on site are disassembled, then meticulously reconstructed piece by piece. 

The distance separating three generations from this land dissolves into particles—concealed within the images, falling into the fissures and flaws of the materials. Entering the Outland constructs a blurred timeline, wandering through a temporality devoid of human presence. Viewers are invited to step into this wasteland, reconnecting with a gradually receding homeland through its faintest remaining traces. 

ARTIST: Xinyu Li

Xinyu Li is a Chinese artist and researcher based in London. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). As an urban explorer, she engages with ruins, architectural remains, and place-based cultures, exploring how abandoned spaces embody personal experiences, historical traces, and social relations.

Working across installation, moving image, illustration, and spatial practices, Xinyu combines site-walking, autoethnography, and visual research to trace the processes through which ruins emerge, transform, and acquire cultural meanings. In recent years, she has drawn from Hakka architecture and ancestral cultural sites, using her family’s abandoned ancestral home and surrounding landscapes as creative contexts to examine how migration, changing patterns of habitation, and relationships with place unfold through architectural spaces.

Her work has been exhibited and published in China, the United States, France, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.