A series of tall, slender canvases in Li Si Rong’s Murmuration push your head back and your eyes up. The scenes they delicately depict unfurl vertically and, together with the show’s title, propel us upwards, to loftier heights. What could feel like an abyss feels like flying, not vertiginous but secure.
That feeling of security, of community, of home, is the hearth of this show. Li uses the mesmeric movements of starlings – onomatopoeically called a murmuration, after the sound of their wingbeats – as a metaphor for community.
Murmuration is an optimistic foil to 2020’s exhibition Little Events on Uninhabited Island, created during the pandemic when people’s homes became their little isolation islands. Here, Pink Forest is conversational, communal, full of trees that all have their own characteristics and personalities, leaning into and onto one another, locked in conversation unintelligible to humans. On the edge depicts a house floating impossibly, hoisting an even more impossible weight, tethered together only by the stem of a daisy. Watchful birds, individualised here in their roosts, tend to their green-tinged nests.
In the eponymous work Murmuration, innumerable birds surge and swoop across a sky bruised in technicolour. On the ground, a field of daisies covers an undulating landscape, mimicking the freewheeling flock overhead while rooted in place. The murmuration appears tiny, far, far away, moving together in a way that is difficult to describe.
Throughout every canvas, Li’s hair-fine linework and translucent, subtle palette feel careful – care-filled. These fine marks are immersive in their smallness, which commands care and attention. In this show Li also, generously, transports her forms into mobiles, translating them into three dimensions, our dimension, where they narrow the gap between the allegorical, suggested community of Li’s painted world, and the literal, possible world of ours, which needs the community she conjures.
Murmurations happen at dusk, on the cusp of night. They happen in autumn and winter, when light is scarce and humans as well as starlings seek the warmth of fellow creatures. Murmurations happen when we need them. Murmuration captures some of that indescribable, communal joy that never ceases to lift spirits and hearts.
Amy Stewart, June 2025
