Tim Li

Tim Li is a 37 year old contemporary Wellington artist producing graphite-on-paper drawings of New Zealand’s marine species. His work displays dramatic monochrome contrast, delicate attention to line detail and true representation of coarse and fine organic textures. 

Growing up in a family-owned Taupō Fish ‘n Chip shop baited the hook for Li’s enchantment with NZ’s aquatic fauna. He spent hundreds of childhood Fridays and Saturdays gazing at the iconic “NZ Commercial Fish Species” poster. Despite being a hundred kilometres from the nearest ocean this iconography fuelled Li’s fascination for the variety, complexity and diversity of NZ’s marine bounty.

Li’s honest, meticulous and truthful representations are offered as an antidote to a growing brag-culture egged on by social media. Too often publicly shared images of fish are deconstructed into objects of status, or ego-baiting. Li offers these precise, magnified representations as objects of fascination; to be admired and appreciated with a botanical reverence. Nature here is returned to a space beyond kill-culture. If art can be said to save lives, Li’s work opens conversations of sustainability, resource management, respectful practise and even gratitude.

Pieces can run well past a hundred careful hours before Li has satisfied his tendency toward perfectionism. Each individually honed piece is a monument to the ocean, and a challenge to the “plenty more fish in the sea” mindset. Rare, treasurable and revered are truer descriptions of both the ocean, and Li’s work.