Li Yilei

Li Yilei is a Chinese-born, London-based artist and composer whose work moves through tacit listening, perceptual thresholds, and the quiet tensions between presence and disappearance. Guided by a quietly mystic approach to sensing, Li treats sound as a porous field of attunement where intuition, resonance, and the barely perceptible begin to speak. Li’s multi-media practice attends to silence, absence, and non-verbal states as active agents that shape perception as much as the audible.
Unfolding through restrained gestures and spectral drift, Li’s compositions often incorporate instruments, objects, spanning tapes, theremins, ethnic instruments, field recordings, self-built devices, and organic materials. Fragments, objects, and transient sites enter the work as momentary anchors within shifting terrains, creating spaces where attention deepens, thresholds blur, and sound becomes a mode of attunement.
Since 2017, alongside releasing music records, Li’s work has spanned performance, installation, and composition for film, theatre, and dance. Their work has been performed and presented internationally at Barbican Centre (UK), King’s Place (UK), Cafe Oto (UK), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), TATE Britain (UK), V&A East Storehouse (UK) ESEA Contemporary (UK); Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (FR), UCCA Contemporary (CN), Tai Kwun Contemporary (HK), Lincoln Center (US); MAO Torino (IT) and more.

https://liyilei.bandcamp.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@li_yi_lei_/videos

Li Yilei at Cafe OTO, 7th May 2023: