Show The Last Picture

Dear visitors,

I’m writing this as I hide from the rain in New York City. Due to many complications, I could not make it out to Santa Fe to install or see my works on view in person. Alex, who runs the gallery, has been so generous and helpful to make everything smooth.

Soon after my exhibition opened, he told me on the phone that he was driving to pick up a dog he’s adopting. Her name is Rita. Later, I received a video of her drinking from a bowl, placed right beneath my work in the hallway. She looked like the most rightful custodian of the art.

I made the majority of this show at my friends Joy and Carrie’s place. They have two cats, Bella and Sherlock. I’ve been taking care of them every so often since six years ago. They know all of my secrets.

Sometimes when I worked on the kitchen table, Bella and Sherlock would jump on and off of the works. Both of them love being touched. I gave them a lot of belly rubs while they laid atop my works. They also give me much affection. I really believe that the motivation for my work comes from needing a place to put my confusion about love.

I decided that during the last days of my show at Alex’s, I want everything to be moved to the eye level of his pet. For a long time I didn’t know how to talk about viewership in relation to my work. I’m starting to understand that my desire is to always watch the others looking, and for the works to respond to being watched.

Today the man I love is adopting a tabby cat. He has a lot of my art in his house. I wonder what she thinks of them.

— Craig Jun Li, October 16, 2026


“CJ” Craig Jun Li (b. 1998, China) is an arts worker and artist based in New York, also a Virgo born in the year of the tiger. Li’s artworks and curatorial projects have been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including Kiang Malingue, New York; Chapter NY, New York; Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon; lower_cavity, Holyoke; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kurtkubin, CDMX; SYSTEMA, Marseille; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles and New York; Taon, Ivry-sur-Seine; ROMANCE, Pittsburgh; Chris Andrews, Montréal; RAINRAIN, New York; September Sessions, Stockholm; hatred 2, New York; Prairie, Chicago; and Canal Projects, New York, among others. Li runs the nomadic curatorial project “Benny’s Video” and facilitates the operation of the estates of David Knudsvig and David Nelson. In 2026, Li will publish his first artist book with Seven Press, New York.

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Press Release – September 1, 2026
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ur mit mals,
re tan of an la rae mi
a called deer f ley
first foun mic, adj.
—Tina Darragh, “volcanic tuff,” from Striking Resemblance (1989)

All black & white westerns oxidize on recall, the vinegar syndrome black verse, as to opposites of forethought. Never the erotics chroma green, all rot relics of Double-X. A sessile attachment to remembered remembering remembered remembering whirr remembered remembering remembered. Flat growth, thin stalk, th€yre. Actor’s category in Laurence Olivier voice: sublimated forearm, sublimated firearm, ante-chivalry of revolving doors. Candice Bergen voice: crop out Edwin H. Land’s shoes. No obeisance to the feathered white lacerations, the that-has-been, the this-will-be. Under what authority of post-post-memory, the woe of surrogacy separates from a problem in gray.

Sunstruck diana among the sweet. Unbrassy, vibrato-less white tone with a steel tread running through it. o, Scultori, not confined to moonlight, o sculptura, you setting sun, de Barbari, na’nts’ey’i’, unconventionally lunar, the web pile. Notice the nightmare formality suspended in time. Notice they’re yours in fleeing. Pronoun-ced within it. This one goes out to you’ll never pay enough (homme fatale: dreamed of, rather’n fully understood.). Fine lil objet for/mat/erial opacifications beyond that chemical curtain, that cherried hydroquinone air. Breathe. You’re filling up on that stuff. Revisit that found in the too much negative being: the not-sovereign chance of nickel vivisecting the negative-outside. Need with, with need: flipping the page intrudes between its and yours.

Against exposure: tarnished site of mock innocence, you pinched little dregs of chic, yearning for Geoje’s Weimar undressing. & so shutter acrobatics thrust shade into arcades and take out the lowly and immutable the. Frame::::rate. Fe transition metal, 26, shiny, gray-. The sainted what-I-crave over the body’s finishing tonnage: every medium, each contact sport, start bath, curse (seal). Is not any x-number of males, ideas swerve to keep hot, this one-sided thing of anything, else a drawing stomped to concrete thought. The enemy beginnings to be: marginal^*

No scenery in the scenery, and cause as effect. The foams’ stress test, or official medicine comes in as seen-it-all. Or, each of that has them: anarene kinesiology taping the untoward zoom of verbs. To define emulsion is looking at them looking at you at all. & verity of surface present in variety of surface, immerse and so on? Well, the form is no logner there, enshrined not by song nor seedy anthem.
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^{______________________________
*} leveling the probable char


“CJ” Craig Jun Li (b. 1998, China) is an arts worker and artist based in New York, also a Virgo born in the year of the tiger. Li’s artworks and curatorial projects have been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including Kiang Malingue, New York; Chapter NY, New York; Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon; lower_cavity, Holyoke; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kurtkubin, CDMX; SYSTEMA, Marseille; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles and New York; Taon, Ivry-sur-Seine; ROMANCE, Pittsburgh; Chris Andrews, Montréal; RAINRAIN, New York; September Sessions, Stockholm; hatred 2, New York; Prairie, Chicago; and Canal Projects, New York, among others. Li runs the nomadic curatorial project “Benny’s Video” and facilitates the operation of the estates of David Knudsvig and David Nelson. In 2026, Li will publish his first artist book with Seven Press, New York.