Ruth Ju-shih Li




As an emerging Taiwanese-Australian artist, my practice reflects a deep engagement with cultural heritage, spirituality, and cross-cultural dialogue. Autobiographical in nature, my work explores impermanence, renewal, and the shared human experience. I create sculptures and site-specific ephemeral installations, often working in-situ with raw materials in their transitional states – inviting change; to soften, to collapse, to return to the earth. My practice exists in these transitory moments; not as objects of preservation, but as gestures of impermanence.

Over time, the remnants are gathered, recycled and shaped again – an ongoing cycle of transformation, with each iteration carrying traces of the last. Working with time as both material and collaborator, my forms become vessels for memory and meditations on the transient nature of the human condition – a celebration of natural cycles.

By embracing the ephemeral and the cyclical, my practice resists monumental forms of sculpture in favour of vulnerability and intimacy, prioritising continuity over permanence. I am interested in the ways the body remembers across generations and how ephemeral processes can become gestures of resilience and create space for healing and re-imagination.

Each work is part of an ongoing conversation—with material, with memory, and with those who encounter it.

Slow, cyclical, and alive.