LUCY MU LI
■ CYCLE 1 fellow — SS 26
I want to tell you about how the land transformed me. About how she, the desert mother, although intense, rugged, and vast, was tender with me. How she grieved with, healed with, wandered with me, unfurled me on the current of her breath into deeper time, into a primordial home my wandering diasporic heart had been longing for for a long, long time.
I became an animal again, remembering how to rise and fall with the sun. I practiced reverence by listening, until I learned to hear the most delicate intonations of her thickest silence—the soft bristling of a creosote in the wind; that ancient immanent tongue that the stones speak, reverberating through my sternum and into the eternal emptiness. I met elders in the form of dead pine trees, frozen and fossilized in perfect, fractal radiance. They taught me how to grow bare and luminous, to wrap soft flesh tenderly around the hard edges of this world.
Here, I practiced my widest surrender, my body splayed open on the grit of boulders, my belly turning as I descended into the cracks and seams, the marrow and magma of a more feral intelligence. You see, to converse with beings who are a millennia or a million years old, we are called to expand. Like our elders, we remember that we too are porous, corrosive—bodies storied with time, alchemically made and unmade with the world. That whatever fortresses we have built long to be unmade, ex to remember what it is to yield.
FIELD NOTES IN THE VORTEX
an interview with the artist
Grown out of years of pilgrimage into the high desert of Southern California—the unceded ancestral homeland of the Serrano, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, and Mojave peoples—Field Notes in the Vortex is an interdisciplinary devotional work by Lucy Mu Li bridging photography, writing, performance, bookmaking, and installation. Since 2023, this project has been researched and developed across residencies at Jackrabbit Studios, High Desert Test Sites / A-Z West, and Kala Art Institute. The limited edition artist book was designed by Lucy Mu Li, printed by For the Birds Trapped in Airports, and bound by Sorella Studios on Tongva land in Los Angeles, California, and produced with generous support from the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship.
LUCY MU LI
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LUCY MU LI *
Lucy Mu Li is a Chinese-American interdisciplinary artist working in conversation with Earth. Queer and between cultures, she is drawn to the liminal: the places where skin meets skin, where texture and shared language emerge at the threshold. She situates her ecological position as that of a translator amongst kin—an earth linguist—working across painting, photography, writing, bookmaking, and installation to weave stories of more-than-human kinship and interconnectedness.
With the origins of her practice in drawing and painting, she listens by hand: synthesizing forms across species and bodies into undulating and topographic portals, illuminating life force as a shared intelligence holding us in togetherness. By learning the languages of our more-than-human kin, Li seeks to recover an expanded sense of ecological belonging. Delicate and ephemeral ecologies unfurl into sacred scripture and secret messages as more-than-human vocabularies integrate into her own. Through the cultivation of shared language, we grow porosity: softening the boundaries in between, and opening portals to our shared landscapes as earthly kin.
As a daughter of diaspora, Li relies on the ritual return to land and place as her most essential method. This dialogue between body and Earth is a process of repair—rerooting and reweaving back into the story of Earth. Over the last several years, Li has grown a devotional fieldwork practice across ecosystems in Southern California, the lands and waters of her childhood and her most intimate ecological kin. Using photography and writing as rituals of deep listening, her field notes get below the bedrock of a fragmented collective consciousness to uncover the animate and eternal swimming
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