Via Li is a Chinese-born painter based in California.

She received her MFA in Illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Her recent work explores emotion as a physical and atmospheric force — something capable of shaping, pressuring, restraining, and transforming both the body and surrounding space. Through fragmented figures, loose charcoal lines, stained surfaces, and shifting fields of color, she investigates the tension between internal emotional systems and external environments.

Working across large-scale canvas and paper, Li develops paintings through a process of layering, erasure, fluid staining, and gestural mark-making. Rather than constructing direct narratives, her work creates emotional spaces where the body appears suspended between emergence and dissolution.

Her practice is deeply influenced by long-term sensitivity toward emotional experience, memory, vulnerability, and psychological tension. Through abstraction and figuration, she seeks to visualize invisible emotional conditions that exist beneath language and surface appearances.