Pastoral pastels: How Haozhe Li channels the poetic everyday

Haozhe Li’s work spins its axis on capturing fleeting motion and translating it into the tangible. The warm Blossoming Freedom portrays a girl leaping between flowers, “embodying youthful vitality” she tells us. Ultimately, the string that ties her illustrations together is the “often overlooked interactions between humans, nature, and animals”. They feel like decorated memories to the eye, embroidered in pastel illustrations of flora and fauna – connection is the heartbeat of her hazy compositions.

Just as her figures jump from the canvas, so does the framing of her pieces. Employing papier-mâche in “echoing the textural quality of my pastel artworks”, Haozhe unifies the entire piece in this extension from the canvas and uses the frame as an “extension of the artwork itself, deepening the viewer’s sensory experience”.

At its core, her art revolves around the abstraction of “emotional or conceptual essence”, Haozhe says, layering up on tone and texture through traditional tempera techniques. Her focus on subtle tones can be traced to visual influence from the films of Éric Rohmer, Haozhe tells us: “What resonates with me most is the grainy texture of analogue film.” She carries the similar feelings of sensorial intimacy in the visual metaphors she materialises when capturing the poetic everyday.