shirt design by Isaac Couch

Max Li is an interdisciplinary artist from China, currently based in Chicago.

His visual practice began with photography, leading him to travel extensively as a documentary photographer, encountering personalities, cultures, and spaces. Alongside contemporary photographic methods, he works with Tintype, a Victorian-era large-format process that produces images on metal plates.

Max’s work transforms transient human interactions into tactile and reflective records of experience. He weaves together found materials, historical references, and contemporary tools to create moments that are at once intimate and expansive, domestic and foreign. His practice embraces chance, making images, objects, and time-based situations. Lyrical and gestural, his work incorporates language fragments, moving supplies, found objects, products, and toys, engaging with themes of ritual, memory, and transition.

Serving as the arts czar at the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago in Woodlawn, Max collaborates with community members and artists to creatively activate the church’s historic spaces. He has organized events ranging from projection light shows, dance, exhibitions,  communal dinners, open practices, theater productions, and other site-responsive projects.

For Max, art exists in the negotiation of paradox, structure and spontaneity, history and imagination, learning and unlearning. His work range-finds between the sacred and the everyday—humanistic yet edged with unpredictability.

For conversation, showing, and other thoughts,
please email: omaxlgzo@gmail.com

Current Position:

Art Director, Big House Studio

Arts Czar (Art Director), The First Presbyterian Church of Chicago