Artist Jingyi Li subverts lace’s ornamental delicacy, transforming symbols of domesticity into tactile expressions of female sexual autonomy.
Chairs, rugs, cutlery—items familiar but often overlooked—are reformed by Chinese artist Jingyi Li in delicate lace, their hard surfaces replaced by thread. Li explores sexuality within domesticity, exposing desire embedded in the everyday. Now one of the newest residents at London-based creative charity Saraband Foundation, Li reframes the ordinary as intimate, sensual and quietly confrontational. Highlighting her own sexuality whilst drawing upon BDSM narratives, she replaces the expected materials of leather and metal with lace, softening traditional symbols of control.
Founded by the late Alexander McQueen, Saraband supports artists who challenge traditional art spaces and push the boundaries of their craft. Li’s work reflects this mission, reviving lace-making while rewriting the narrative of a female-dominated craft. “Before Saraband, I questioned whether I could actually call my work art,” she admits, reflecting lace’s difficult positioning between craft, art and textiles.
Made at home and passed down through the maternal line, lace has long been confined to the ornamental, dismissed by patriarchal narratives as frivolous. Li subverts that decorative fragility, returning it to the home while introducing themes of sexuality absent from the culture around her growing up in China. “How often are we hiding it!” Li says. “People think it does not exist, or we don’t talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it.”
In April, her work returns to her homeland for her first solo exhibition, titled A Tender Puncture, at the Absent Gallery in Guangzhou. The title references the physical act of lace-making; the needle puncturing through the surface; a gesture that shifts power into the craft and binds femininity to her own intimacy and relationships. “I create a bedroom scene or a very intimate home, a personal private space,” she says. “Each piece is part of the journey of my life, and I want to talk with the audience in this small room.” The exhibition returns lace to its traditional privacy while deepening her fascination with how objects mirror the human form.
“I think a spoon can be sexy or a chair can be sexy, it doesn’t have to be a body,” she says. Her connection to objects runs parallel to her connection with people. “I use daily objects because I personally have a strong connection with an object, and I find them all individually, almost like a human being.” Through this process, Li draws attention to the ways desire can exist beyond the body, with each lace-making method carrying its own narrative.
Her larger works, including tapestries and rugs, are constructed using Battenburg lace, an industrial American technique combining strips of lace tape, bound through hours of hand-woven thread. In her Obedient Objects collection, the tiger rug took four months to make and merges Battenburg with fillet lace, a needle-based technique with Egyptian origins, to define the tiger’s stripes.
Battenburg lace on Filet Lace
“I don’t think lace is the name of one specific craft; it is more like a visual type,” Li explains. For her, lace is not defined by its method, but by its optical and emotional effect; the technique shifts depending on the scale and intricacy of the piece. “All my artwork talks about personal stories or experiences, like different special moments in my life or unique relationships with people,” she says.
‘Welcome’, a mat which is another intricate example of Li’s Battenburg lace, reflects on a poignant memory of hers that happened after moving to the Uk from Beijing. A contradiction to its sentiment, the mat welcomes you onto something delicate, not to be walked on. This contradiction stems from a layover in a Chinese airport before returning to London— “I felt like the airport was a fake welcome for me”, she says— describing the feeling of being in her home country but not being able to leave. That feeling surfaces in the lacework pattern, which depicts the iron fencing often used in Chinese infrastructure to divide communal areas and schools, a familiar sight to Li.
“You can’t use a language to describe it,” she says, referring to the way lacework is traditionally taught. It exists as a physical language, learned through the hands rather than spoken instruction. Whilst many contemporary lace makers rely on digital software to generate patterns, Li draws each one by hand, creating an ancient dialogue or intricate puzzle that she can follow. Most intricate of all is her Hidden Draw collection, which uses bobbin lace, manipulating dozens of threads at once to create precise, translating her hand-drawn patterns in fibre.
Replacing cold metal cutlery with lace, Li reconstructs knives, forks and spoons entirely from thread. The objects retain their recognisable forms, yet lose their original function. Once rigid, now fragile, almost bodily. “I think working with soft materials is more of an operation [...] like a communication with material,” she explains. The process becomes a non-verbal negotiation between control and surrender, echoing the BDSM narratives in her work.
By translating metal into lace, Li disrupts the authority associated with hardness. Materials traditionally linked to BDSM culture, leather and metal, are replaced with something historically feminised, decorative and domestic. “I think the heavy metal and leather connect with gay culture a lot, so some females in this community often lose their voice,” she says. Reintroducing lace into this space allows femininity to reclaim presence within fetish narratives. Yet Li is careful not to reduce fetishism solely to sex. “I think fetishism is about everything really, it doesn’t have to be about that,” she says.
Lace contradicts itself as a figure of purity and sex, but Li moves beyond sex to intimacy. This closeness becomes particularly visible in her ‘Lean On Me’ collection. Two plastic garden chairs, the kind left outside permanently, slowly weathering from white to grey, are reconstructed in pale fillet lace. Suspended in thread, they remain permanently white. Their forms originate from a moment of physical intertwining: Li and her partner spooning in bed. The chairs become stand-ins for the body, holding the weight of physical memory without depicting flesh directly.
In Li’s hands, Lacework becomes a vehicle for sexual autonomy and female expression. Her work gives voice to a practice historically defined by silence and inheritance. “I think the process of making lace is almost like writing a diary,” she says. Through thread, memory and desire are recorded permanently, and hers is left as an open book.