A gallery of thoughts swimming around me. Colour. Texture. Motion held in stillness. The exhibition is titled ‘Across Eurasia, Encountering Ulster’. The paintings feel unmistakably cross-cultural: landscapes of Ulster filtered through another way of seeing. I finally read the leaflet in my hand. Lin Li draws on East Asian painterly philosophies such as qiyun shengdong and cunfa, spirit resonance paired with textural brushwork, to depict European terrain through the lens of an Asian artist.

As a Malaysian-Chinese person who has lived in Belfast for over a year, I recognise this feeling immediately. To live abroad is to feel universally different and universally familiar at the same time. I went home and kept thinking: What is it that feels so distant, yet so close? Contradictions can coexist, of course. But what I was sensing here felt more precise than contradiction. It was nuanced. Specifically, culturally nuanced. Ways of seeing that overlap without collapsing into one another. This is where intersectionality lives for me: not through conflict, but layering.

In Lin Li’s work, through the lens of intersectionality, spirit resonance does not belong solely to the land or to the artist. It emerges from their encounter. My favourite painting was ‘Sleepwalking Dún Lúiche’. Viewed through the lens of intersectionality, ‘Sleepwalking Dún Lúiche’ becomes more than a gorgeous, green landscape with three pieces of quiet architecture still in the distance; the painting as a whole is a site of extended identity and negotiated belonging formed through cultural transition. Thus, the overlapping, dreamy texture becomes a record of the negotiation within an artist who has moved from China to Northern Ireland, rather than sole mastery of traditional technique.

Lin Li’s approach to painting Dún Lúiche depicts what her mind has translated the landscape into from an East-Asian lens. She has also resisted a singular narrative of the perception of Irish landscape, instead offering a creative, dreamlike difference shaped by cultural roots, migration, and an artist’s presence.

I’d like to believe I understand Lin Li’s work relatively thoroughly. I think people like us try to bring the memory of home wherever we go. We try to hold onto our identity as we try to belong.

I am guided gently along a pathway, but I make no sound.

A shimmering silhouette in the distance?

I do not question and follow obediently.

I am locked into this mystical journey now.

These fálta dorcha are filled with wonder.

The sense of disorientation becomes overwhelming.

Emotions fluctuate between intrigue and fear, appreciation and curiosity.

I willingly disconnect from reality as I cross over from landscape to dreamscape.

But this is no allegorical journey.

No Dante’s selva oscurra.

No mid-life crisis nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.

This is a fragile passageway between reality and fantasy.

I surrender to the hypnotic power and acquiesce to this mystical trance.

This is nature’s kaleidoscopic vortex.

Yes, I know where I’m going now.

This is a gateway to my infinite imagination where everything is possible.