**FOR OUR EUROPEAN FAM** Please show some love to Larry Li (@larryli_official) by visiting his solo show, “fragments of a story” at @f2tgallery in Milan. You can catch him at the opening on July 7th. Huge shot out to Francesco for making this happen🫱🏾‍🫲🏻. 🎥 by @samfreakingli About the exhibition: A central aspect to my practice centers around the fragmentation of identity as a Chinese American. We all engage with our own sense of self through fragmented perspectives. Little pieces of a whole. The stories, experiences, and information that one hopes will connect into a cohesive image of self. However I’ve come to realize the complexity of one’s identity is filled with missing pieces, misaligned memories, and a never ending yearning for more answers. In this body of work I lean into those very misalignments of my cultural identity. Paintings of family photographs intertwine with paintings of chaotic scenes of civil unrest during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, to show the duality of tenderness and trauma in my particular history. The works engage with the material to highlight the lack of clarity I experience when engaging with these lost memories. Pastel and oil sticks inscribe cultural symbols on top of paintings, scenes of family members and soldiers are loosely rendered through paint and photo transfer techniques. The familial and historical photograph become a central aspect to the process of where each work comes from, in some instances I strive to blur the line between where the photograph ends and the painting begins. Or where historical events and inherited experiences intersect. These different aspects of my cultural history are depicted in a way that denies the viewer and myself complete access yet brings us closer to an authentic perspective of a fragmented individual.