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 Li’s 2020 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.

Li Si Rong (b.1994, Taiwan) is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She has an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland (2021). Li received the Creative New Zealand Early Career Fund – Toi Tipu Toi Rea in 2024. The support from this funding has aided this exhibition. Li’s work is composed of daily debris, objects and theoretical reflection. She focuses specifically on everyday life, dreams and the relationship between humanity and things. She works across diverse mediums from painting, sculpture, photography and installation. Recent exhibitions include RM Gallery and Project Space (2024), Sanderson Contemporary (2024/2023), Studio One Toi Tu (2023), Depot Artspace (2022).