Kin Ting Li review: all or nothing at all
7 min read
Billy Parker finds infatuation and heartbreak in the mysterious, undulating landscapes of Kin Ting Li

Kin Ting Li, Floaters, 2024, oil and mixed media on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist and South Parade. Photography Corey Bartle-Sanderson
I woke up this morning with the spritely attitude of a young wanting writer from an early noughties rom-com, the only difference being I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I’m being sent on my first formal journalistic assignment, to review Kin Ting Li’s exhibition ‘Pockets of Want and Need’ at South Parade. I get the feeling that my Editor, Harriet, is trying to make a journalist out of me. I oblige, willingly, as my veins fill plump with the all-too-familiar symptoms of imposter syndrome.
I spent my morning walk through Romford’s somber brutalism comparing versions of the jazz standard All or Nothing at All, an exercise born from a revisited obsession with Frank Sinatra, the definitive version being Sarah Vaughan’s 1965 recording. Vaughan’s vocals have, to me, always felt questioning, as though their purpose isn’t to ornament the orchestra or band but rather, act as a tool to investigate and question the musical landscape they float across. Her vibrato digs into the song’s substrate like a dog digging up the garden or a flat fish rifling through sand, in an attempt to unearth buried secrets.

Romford, Essex
As I’m standing in the quiet calm of the Farringdon gallery, nestled in an historic London building, I can hear Vaughan’s vocals ringing in the backs of my ears. Across his recent body of work, Kin Ting Li has developed a series of mysterious, smokey, undulating landscapes. Their aesthetic reference pendulums between 20th century and contemporary painting, at times echoing Chagall or the Italian Futurists. Each canvas is thick with re-working, providing a bolstered, geographical surface for crisp poetic line-like forms to navigate. Using a similar device to Vaughan, these forms wander through a spectral terrain as our much required guide that leads us through the works, but also dispels and questions the very surface that supports them. The paintings ring with vibrations that I visualise in slow-motion, oscillating patterns that reach across the void space of the gallery, bouncing from work to work, escaping through windows. It feels as though Li has forced this cymatic energy into each canvas and somehow fixed it there, particularly in the exhibition’s two white paintings Floaters and Reinvigoration (both 2024), that feel like avalanches frozen in motion, having bulged outward to become almost bodily. They are calmed by Li’s intricate use of colour that glazes across the snow-rock surface, refracting the full colour spectrum like gentle morning sun on ice.

South Parade, Farringdon
There are moments throughout All or Nothing at All where the questioning tone of the song is abandoned and we are led towards possible resolve, particularly when recounting memories. Again, a device mirrored in Li’s works Insinuation, 2022-2024 and Safe Space, 2024 where forms become more recognisable. This gives the more abstract works their power, heightening the desire to pry into every crevice of the painted texture.
Whilst the exhibition text, written by Lucy Rose Cunningham, references science fiction, I can’t help but feel confronted by something totally human. This form of real investigative painting, where all aspects of the medium have been opened, analysed and manipulated, can only be a result of a deeper, self-exploratory emotional state. It is now rare for artists to know how to provide such vulnerability, whilst also possessing the skills and tenderness to translate this through paint. This idea is reinstated by the exhibition’s title ‘Pockets of Want and Need’ and is most evident in the white paintings, which in viewing, re-activate the throbbing elation of complete infatuation, the pulsating pain of heartbreak, and/or other adjacent emotional experiences located in the stomach.

Installation view of Kin Ting Li at South Parade, courtesy of the Artist and South Parade. Photography Corey Bartle-Sanderson
My one issue with the exhibition is the painting hung over a window. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this done and I do understand the commercial need to capitalise on space but, on this occasion, it disrupts the active relationships between the works and their environment. The paintings and their secrets float around my foggy thoughts as I plod back through Romford, passing under the 2007 sci-fi car park ramp, still listening to All or Nothing at All.

Kin Ting Li, 'Safe Space', 2024, oil and mixed media on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist and South Parade. Photography Corey Bartle-Sanderson

Back to Romford
'Pockets of Want and Need' is on view at South Parade until 15th February 2025.