Biography Raised within the rapidly urbanising terrains of northern China, Miao Li (b. 1996) situated his longing for the distant and the poetic within ink painting, wildlife documentaries and fantasy literature. Now based in the Netherlands, his practice operates diasporically, traversing ecologies, aesthetics, and epistemic systems.
Working with trees as non-human collaborators, his practice unfolds rhizomatically, less as a fixed structure than as an evolving network of relations. Drawing from bonsai, urban forestry, and mythology, he engages material, biological, and cosmic formations as interdependent processes. Through iterative investigations of structure, pattern, and space, he develops a craft of connection that mediates between the physical, conceptual, and spiritual realms, foregrounding their latent continuities.
Informed by traditions of nature reverence and ancestral worship, and shaped by Buddhist monastic training, Li has cultivated an intuitive, embodied, and situated methodology. Making becomes a process of attunement to emergent conditions in the present. His scenographic installations manifest as immersive environments, akin to sacred groves or ritual sites, where the minute and the vast are mutually implicated. By centring non-human agency, his work traces distributed sensibilities across time, space, and matter, unsettling the hegemony of anthropocentrism.
Curriculum Vitae
Exhibition
-
2026 Group Exhibition As Within, So Without, Van Eesteren Museum (NL)
-
2025 Solo Exhibition Root Emotions, Van Eesteren Museum (NL)
-
2025 Pop-up Show at KVVAK event with gallery CHAxART, Rijksmuseum (NL)
-
2025 Group Exhibition Beinglonging: New Trajectories in the Third Context, gallery CHAxART, Design Biennale Rotterdam (NL)
-
2024 Group Exhibition ZEN AIR EIHEIJI (JP)
-
2023 Group Exhibition ArtEZ Finals (NL)
-
2022 Group Exhibition The Symbiocene Forest, BioArt Laboratories, Dutch Design Week (NL)
-
2022 Group Exhibition Chacycle, gallery CHAxART (NL)
- 2021 Solo Exhibition Eat Together, gallery CHAxART (NL)
Residencies and Grants
- 2025 Talent Development Grant, Creative Industries Fund NL (NL)
- 2024 Artist in Residence, ZEN AIR EIHEIJI (JP)
- 2024 Design Grant, Creative Industries Fund NL (NL)
- 2024 Project Subsidies for the Professional Arts, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst (NL)
- 2024 Grant Stroomversneller, Cultuur Academy (NL)
- 2021 First Prize of Design Contest Cor Unum (NL)
Education
- 2026-2025 Monastic Training, Zen River Temple (NL)
- 2023-2019 BA Product Design, Cum Laude, ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL)
- 2018-2014 BEng Industrial Design, China University of Mining and Technology (CN)
Working Experience
- 2024-2023 Junior Designer, Jongeriuslab (NL)
- 2022 Internship, Jos Klarenbeek (NL)
- 2021 Internship, Fillip Studios (NL)
- 2019 Internship, Benwu Studio (CN)
Teaching Experience
- 2026 Workshop Introduction to Basket Weaving, UNStudio (NL)
- 2025 Labweek Making Meditation, Materials in Artistic Practices, Frank Mohr Institute (NL)
- 2024 Workshop Introduction to Basket Weaving, Kamishini Elementary School (JP)
- 2024 Workshop Artifical Botany, Graphic Design, ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL)
- 2023 Workshop Material Inquiry, Product Design, ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL)