In London, you can meet a curator every three steps, but it’s rare to come across someone like Evangeline Li. She brings together the subtle foundations of Asian aesthetics and the practical intuition of the British curatorial system. In a city increasingly saturated with contemporary art, she responds to a simple yet profound question with her combinations of work, spatial language, and site-specific energy: Why do we still need exhibitions today?
While curating often trends towards the aesthetic and performative, Li offers more. Her exhibitions transform questioning into an art form and transcend beyond art presentations to engage with critical inquiry. Li constructs experiences that interrogate culture and identity through visibility and authorship in both grand museum halls, galleries ,and intimate salon spaces.
At a time when human consciousness is growing ever more awake, the world needs deeper reflection driven by both art and practice. Evangeline is one of the key advocates of that. She isn’t someone who “produces exhibitions”; she’s more of a re-arranger of reality. She builds bridges and interfaces—reconnecting audiences, artworks, space, and society. Over the past 13 years, she has curated more than a hundred international projects, weaving together curatorial direction, brand strategy, arts education, and cultural connectivity into —an unusually complete and cohesive practice.
Li’s curatorial practice is shaped by an ongoing engagement with East–West exchange, not as contrast, but as conversation. Having lived and worked between Asia and the UK, she brings a cross-cultural sensitivity that informs both the conceptual and material layers of her exhibitions. Rather than framing cultural difference as thematic, she weaves it into the fabric of her work—whether through pairing Chinese craftsmanship with contemporary installation, or drawing poetic connections between Eastern philosophies and Western aesthetics. Her approach is less about fusion and more about resonance: creating space for parallel histories to speak, and for new narratives to emerge in the in-between.
Li’s approach is meticulous. Her curatorial style bears a quiet but striking imprint: it is emotionally and conceptually intricate, layered with complexity. With a defiance of contradiction, her work takes shape from the generative tension between care and critique, disruption and tradition, lived experience and symbolism.
One of her recent projects was “Unveiling Majesty: Warhol’s Queen Elizabeth II,” held at the V&A Museum on 3rd February 2025, with Li serving as director and curator for ARTTOO. The show didn’t merely present Warhol’s portraits of the Queen; it restructured the power dynamics between monarchy and pop art through a minimalist lens. More importantly, it avoided the trap of symbolic consumption and instead opened up a space for cultural reinterpretation. The showcase drew attendees such as Maye Musk, mother of tech tycoon Elon Musk, members of the British Royal Family, and art collectors, while also sparking discourse in academic and media circles around how images shape collective memory.
Highlights from “Butterfly Effect”, presented by ARTTOO at the Museum of London on 11 April 2025 Image courtesy of ARTTOO
Following that, “Butterfly Effect”, presented by ARTTOO at the Museum of London on 11th April 2025, took a completely different direction: high in sensory density, strong in presence, and open in structure. Featuring dancers from Marina Abramovic’s team and musicians from Ministry of Sound, the immersive project transformed the museum into an energy field—an experimental space around the idea of the body as ritual. It defied easy classification: exhibition, performance, or live art. That ambiguity was precisely its value. The team approached the event as a means of disrupting habitual logic, inviting the audience to engage not just intellectually, but physically—to be fully present, in their bodies, in the moment.
Installation view of “Sentire: You Are the April Sky” at Upsilon Gallery Image courtesy of Upsilon Gallery/ Photography by David Owens
And now, her role as the Upsilon Gallery Exhibition Director and curator of “Sentire: You Are the April Sky” brings together six female artists with cultural diversity in mind: Ava Grauls, Diane Chappalley, Epona Smith, Evie Mae Jacobs, Guan Guan, and Hannah Lim. The intuition and the sensorial knowledge in combination with identity construction, serve as focal points of the exhibition. Its title draws from the Italian poet Alda Merini, whose use of “sentire” speaks to feeling as a mode of understanding. The exhibition calls attention to how the emotional and perceptual terrain that people interact with each day is navigated. The framework is further enriched with a gentle nod to Lin Huiyin’s poem “You Are the April Sky in This World” which casts the feminine as both subject and atmosphere: present, shifting, and quietly commanding.
Balancing cultural vision with commercial goals is one of the most rewarding challenges in Li’s work. She sees luxury as more than surface—treating it as a space for dialogue and curatorial possibility. Her collaborations with CHANEL, Chaumet, Gucci, and Harrods are not merely brand partnerships; they are grounded in a shared respect for craftsmanship, storytelling, and cultural relevance. Li often reimagines commercial spaces as extensions of the gallery—where fashion, installation, and performance converge to ask deeper questions about value. With care and intention, she transforms art salons and boutiques into platforms for cultural exchange, subtly reshaping how we understand the relationship between art and its broader social and beyond.
Li’s dual focus—amplifying the voices of women and emerging artists while engaging with global luxury brands—reflects a deliberate and contemporary curatorial strategy. It allows her to operate across both experimental and institutional terrains with fluency and purpose. She believes that the future of curation lies in hybridity: in building ecosystems where critical practices can thrive across multiple contexts. By bridging disciplines and audiences, Li fosters not only visibility but cultural continuity—where exhibitions become spaces for lasting exchange between artwork, viewer, and society at large. Her curating doesn’t just speak to insiders—it aims to build an open, discursive public sphere for art.
If contemporary art needs people who push its structural thinking forward, Evangeline is clearly one of them: she’s a system builder. Her projects resist labels while creating depth, and avoid repetition while expanding curatorial methods.
In today’s art world—dominated by AI-generated images, algorithmic suggestions, and “see-and-snap” exhibition logic— there’s a quiet confidence in her practice, shaped by years of cross-cultural experience and a refusal to simplify. Her projects may seem slow, complex, even demanding of emotional labor from the viewer. But that’s precisely why they matter. They invite people to pause, reflect, breathe. In doing so, her exhibitions become mirrors—prompting the viewer to ask: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? They carry weight. They have a reason to exist.
She doesn’t just curate objects—she creates conditions. Conditions for meaning, for memory, and for new forms of connection to take root.
