Born in China
2023 Gradated from Graduate School of Art and Design, Tama Art University (M.A.)
2026 Graduated from Doctoral Degree Program, Graduate School of Art and Design, Tama Art University (Ph.D.)

Solo Exhibitions:
2022 “Modern fossil”, Changting Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2023 “The Magician of the Comet”, b Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2024 “Apocalypse: The Present State of Creation and Destruction”, MJK Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2025 “Apotheosis”, MJK Lads Gallery, Osaka, Japan
2025 “In Suspension. As Structure.” MJK Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

Group Exhibitions:
2021 “Charity Biennale”, Fei Art Museum Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
2022 “Tokyo Five Art Universities Exchange Exhibition”, 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo,

Japan
2023 “Tama Art University In-house Exhibition”, Tama Art University, Tokyo, Japan
2023 “Joint Graduation Exhibition of Five Art Universities in Tokyo”, The National Art Center, Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
2023 “Asian Ship 2023”, Fei Art Museum Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
2023 “HOCUS POCUS CIRCUS” HIGURE 17-15 cas Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2023 “ART Students STARS Vol.2”, +ART GALLERY, Tokyo, Japan

Awards:
2021 Changting Gallery Open Call Exhibition, Selected
2021 Turner Award, Future Prize
2022 Monster Exhibition, Selected Artist
2022 The 1st Fei Puro Art Award, Selected
2022 Shibuya Awards 2022, Selected
2023 The 2nd Fei Puro Art Award, Kyuryudo Prize
2023 Minoya Student Selection Exhibition, Selected
2023 Idemitsu Art Award 2023, Selected
2024 CAF Award, Selected

コンセプト：
Canchen Li’s practice investigates how inherited narratives embedded in materials become unstable through perceptual experience. Rather than treating artistic production as the creation of autonomous objects, his work constructs situations in which pre-existing relations attached to materials are displaced, allowing alternative experiential structures to emerge. Working across installation, painting, and object-based arrangements, Li examines conditions in which familiar material narratives no longer cohere into a stable perceptual order.
At the center of his practice is ruinality, a self-developed theoretical and artistic concept. Ruinality does not describe material ruin, physical decay, or historical nostalgia. Instead, it names an experiential condition that arises when material narratives, temporal layers, and spatial relations intersect without resolution. In such conditions, materials retain traces of prior meanings while simultaneously exceeding them, producing a state in which perception is suspended between recognition and estrangement. Ruinality is not an inherent property of objects or spaces, but a relational condition activated through encounter, duration, and perceptual negotiation.
Li’s work explores how this condition becomes operative when materials are removed from habitual narrative frameworks yet continue to carry embedded histories and relational inscriptions. This displacement does not result in absence or neutrality, but generates tension between what materials have been understood to signify and how they are presently encountered. Viewers are confronted with situations that resist immediate interpretation, requiring bodily orientation and sustained perceptual engagement rather than symbolic decoding. What emerges is not the negation of prior meaning, but the coexistence of multiple incompatible narrative layers within a single experiential field.
Working across media, Li treats painting, installation, and spatial configuration as interdependent modes of inquiry rather than discrete categories. Surfaces, supports, and spatial relations are composed to produce layered temporalities and shifting perceptual thresholds. These configurations do not guide viewers toward predetermined narratives or emotional responses, but establish conditions in which perception must continuously adjust in response to material presence, spatial tension, and temporal unfolding. Within these conditions, human-centered narratives recede while material agencies assert their own forms of continuity and resistance.
Li positions artistic practice as a mode of knowledge production that emerges through material and spatial experimentation rather than theoretical illustration. Concepts are not imposed upon works but develop through sustained engagement with material relations and perceptual experience. His ongoing projects continue to examine how ruinality manifests across different spatial, cultural, and institutional contexts, remaining grounded in experiential conditions.