Dean Qiulin Li

Dean Qiulin Li is a photographic medium artist who lives and works in Sydney. Dean’s work explores the nature of photography and its capacity to capture the reality and its limits. Starting with traditional documentary photography, Dean has delved deeper into the process of capturing reality and the liminal space that exists between reality and fiction in photography. This has become the driving force behind his artistic practice. Using the visual language of documentary photography, he reconstructs past events and memories in reality. Dean’s work strives to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, creating an immersive, open-ended viewing experience. Dean looks at this series of work as a form of street photography. It is the reconstruction of past moments based on memories in his mind. The questions surrounding this series revolves around whether the reconstructed reality remains real and how  it relates to the interplay between truth and fiction. In today’s rapidly evolving landscape of online media and unprecedented algorithmic power, the gap in people’s perception of reality has grown larger. Individuals are fed news tailored to their preferences, shaping our understanding of the world. This becomes particularly evident during elections, referendums, and societal events in various countries. This body of work aims to explore the construction/ reconstruction of memory, examining what truth and fiction mean in this post-truth era. It also seeks to uncover the essence of collective memory and the composition of history.