Mengzhu Li’s Mother-Daughter is a quiet reckoning — a gentle, complex exploration of the emotional geographies of the mother-daughter relationship, particularly within the specific parameters that exist among only-child families in East Asian cultural contexts. Mutual Disconnect offers a quiet reckoning—a gentle, complex look at the emotional landscape of the mother-daughter relationship, especially within the unique dynamics of only-child families in East Asian cultural contexts. At first glance, the photographs may seem simple—muted palettes, sparse rooms, and figures often turned away from the camera. Yet beneath this surface, Li opens an intricate conversation about intimacy and distance, love and estrangement, duty and desire. The work moves us through moments suspended between gesture and stillness, body and boundary, connection and separation.
The series won’t give an inch to melodrama, to dramatizing the frictions involved. Instead, it presents a visual language at once fragile and freighted, hovering between exposure and obfuscation. Li’s pictures do not scream or flour their arms. They whisper. They linger. They ask for sustained, up-close attention to the subtleties of family dynamics that so frequently resist articulation, particularly in cultures that privilege harmony, understood but unspoken agreements between parties, and careful management of emotional expression.
An entire world can fit into a single image. Think about the two women, side by side but facing away from the viewer. One hand grips her hip as though embedded in it; the other hand’s fingers flirt with her hair, no more than a suggestion of a touch, in a moment that is both strained and sweet. Their bare skin leaves them exposed but protected, an open state mitigated by the invisible lines drawn to keep them apart. These physical postures — frozen, static — emerge as eloquent signs of a difficult balance: the tension between longing for proximity and the assertion of independence. The exposure in their nudity is not rawness but an invitation to witness an emotional landscape defined by boundaries overt and hidden.
Li’s decision to shoot from behind is a conscious one, and there is plenty of meaning in why. The viewer is denied the immediate clues of facial expression or direct gaze, and hence must read such passages only through body language — stark, minimalist body language, laden with unspoken significance. And in stripping the face, a conventional window to emotional truth, this denial of full expression resists easy interpretation or voyeuristic consumption. Instead, it invites empathy. We are invited not to spectacle but to the weight of what is held in silence: histories, cultural imperatives, and personal struggles encoded in posture and gesture.
In Break, two women, a mother and daughter eat bananas, facing each other in near-mirror symmetry. It’s a visually provocative image, highly loaded, deliberate, and unsettling in its ambiguity. The act is at once mundane and charged: the banana, a familiar fruit, becomes a cipher for themes of nurture, consumption, sensuality, and power. Their mouths are open but not speaking; their gazes distant, perhaps inward. The mirrored posture evokes a silent confrontation. One that makes the viewer question where play ends and tension begins. This image is a moment suspended between imitation and rebellion, intimacy and estrangement, drawing attention to the blurred line between motherly caregiving and a daughter’s search for autonomy. The discomfort is the point. I feel Li uses that discomfort to force us into deeper engagement.
Moving on, In Two in One, the message is stark, brutal-like in its clarity: the mother’s mouth is sealed with red-taped Xs, while the daughter, turned in profile, looks on, her lips painted a bold, uncompromising red. It’s a striking reversal of traditional roles. The mother’s silence is not self-chosen; it’s enforced, a visual metaphor for emotional suppression, for the generations of women told to hold their tongue. Meanwhile, the daughter’s gaze is unreadable, confrontational or detached.
The cultural antecedents of these images are crucial. The long shadow of the one-child policy. As China officially moved away from a one-child policy in late 2015, there remains a strong cultural legacy that influences family structure and expectations. In these households, the only daughter is frequently tasked with multiple responsibilities: caregiver, cultural preserver, emotional enabler. These roles help to create an intricate emotional geography, where love is also an obligation — a geography that is both sacred and asphyxiating. Li’s raw, intimate images conjure this world with a quiet intensity, in which the joys of familial love are haunted by the way it can weigh on individual lives.
But Mother-Daugther won’t stay pinned down to cultural specifics. Underneath its specific setting emerges a universal exploration of family as a precious, precarious emotional economy. Li charts the spaces in which love and conflict can coexist, where aspiration swirls with regret, and silence is the heaviest of all. These images do not dramatize conflict with angled edges but trace it with soft hands, between shared silences and spatial tension. The silent tension between figures points toward the still-evolving, fluid work of selfhood — an ongoing self-negotiation enacting itself within the web of familial kinship.
Li’s own stance — navigating life in both China and the U.K. — provides a multilayered resonance to the work. As a subject navigating a web of cultural terrains, she conveys the emotional truth of diaspora and hybridity with the insider quality of nuance and an outsider’s sharpness. The liminal space her subjects occupy — in between tradition and modernity, belonging and estrangement — is a metaphor for what many experience by living between worlds. The photograph she composes feels both personal and fragmented, reflecting the multiplicity of selves such a life leaves behind.
The emotional punch is deepened by aesthetic decisions. The muted color palette, the quiet interiors — often uncluttered, hushed — draw attention acutely to the bodies and their gestures. The windows allow soft, natural light to shed shadows that play to contemplative melancholia. The emptiness is not lack but plenitude, a conscious minimalism that makes it possible for the posture and behavior of the actors to bear the meaning. Every fold of skin, every curve of an arm, every brush of a fingertip is freighted with significance.
But Mutual Disconnect is more than just photography. Li’s multidisciplinary strategy — video, text, handmade books, and installation — deepens the emotional and conceptual textures of the project. Her small, handmade books have a tactile intimacy analogous to the physical proximity installations, while the gallery installations remake spaces into immersive environments, in which viewers are not merely spectators but participants, enveloped in a subtle dance of closeness and distance. These spatial encounters expand the work’s subject matter outside the frame, inviting the viewer physically into the tensions and harmonies found in family relationships.
This cross-disciplinary approach reflects Li’s interstitial identity — a negotiation of many different cultural and artistic traditions. Just as she is torn between China and the U.K., between tradition and modern life, she melds together disparate artistic disciplines to show the layered, frequently conflicting truths of identity and family. Her art is a crucible within which intimate personal stories match with striding social commentary, creating a rich and nuanced understanding of what it means to be an East Asian woman grappling with the demands of tradition, individuality, and obligation.
Ultimately, Mother-Daughter is a call to look—not just outward, but through the many layers of relationships as delicate equilibria shaped by love, strain, and culture. The show moves beyond its cultural specificity to reveal universal truths about identity, belonging, and the emotional labor that family demands. This labor is especially intense in the mother-daughter relationship, where love and frustration coexist—where a daughter can both love and resent her mother at the same time. In traditional Chinese families, mothers often seek to protect their children but also exert control, believing it is for their child’s own good, without fully considering how the child might feel. Li’s images capture this complex emotional conflict, striking a delicate balance between tenderness and tension. They convey the hopes and regrets, the reaching out and pulling back, that swirl within these bonds. The body becomes a site of memory and feeling—a meeting place of past and present, shown through gestures of approach and withdrawal.
Mother-Daughter also speaks to the ethical responsibilities of artistic creativity. Li’s work recognizes art’s power to foster empathy and dialogue, bridging cultural divides and highlighting our shared humanity. In this way, the series is more than a personal story; it opens a broader conversation about femininity, ethnic identity, and the complicated ways women navigate their sense of self and family.
The polarization and potentiality of the cultural mestizo are embodied in Mengzhu Li herself. Having lived in Beijing for most of her life and now based in London, her perspective is rooted primarily in her Chinese experience rather than Western cultural influence. Instead, this project was created to be shown in the West, aiming to bring greater awareness to the struggles that many Chinese families face today. This intention gives Mother-Daughter its emotional charge—a heartfelt meditation on the paradoxes of identity in a place where cultural boundaries are porous yet deeply felt.
With an expanding body of work being showcased both in London and Milan, Ardda now emerges as a force to be reckoned with in 21st-century photography. Exhibitions such as Dreams and Nightmares at Boomer Gallery and Conceptual Erasure at Blank Canvas Fulham situate her work solidly within discourses about psychological and social identity. Her inclusion in international art weeks is further evidence of how far her gift for articulating urgent cultural questions in an original and complex visual language is being recognised.
Graduating with a Master’s degree in Contemporary Photography and Philosophy from Central Saint Martins has profoundly influenced her artistic vision, allowing her to explore the intricate dynamics of belonging – particularly within mother-daughter relationships in only-child families. Her work reflects a blend of personal narrative and wider societal themes, using photography alongside video, text, handmade books, and installations to create immersive experiences. These multidisciplinary approaches invite audiences to engage deeply with the emotional nuances of identity, culture, and family, reinforcing her growing reputation on the international stage.
In the end, Mother-Daughter provides a profoundly humanitarian portrait of life straddling worlds — culturally, emotionally, artistically. It dares its audience to look beyond superficial judgments and consider the subtle layers of family, identity, and place. Li’s stories are an invitation to accept the ambiguities of relationships and cultural narratives, and they encourage us to educate empathetic muscles in a world that is so often torn apart by difference.
In one frame, one simple gesture, Li reveals the weight of history and expectation faced by women who love fiercely but have to practice the delicate art of separating themselves. That tension — between the connected and the disconnected — is what drives the series and, as we see, perhaps human nature.
