Li Ran’s work explores the history of art, making narrative use of dimensions that are imbricated or intersect with it, which range from the formal and institutional to the social and introverted, extrapolating upon structures he perceives, and overlaying references to the art world’s present with his own rich and personal engagement with anteceding cultural forms and milieus.

In Li Ran’s The Night in the Wrong Seat, two men occupy a swept corner table in a dim room next to a vacuum of still-life forms; through the membrane that envelopes this adjacent, contrastingly two-dimensional space, forms appear to burst in the direction of where the two men sit, one of them greatly focused on the scene which is not quite “in the room” with them, and the other preoccupied by thoughts of his own, and as little aware of the sight next to him as the encumbrance that its incursion may soon pose to the narrow space in which he is taking his tense repose.