Ugo Li – Still Lives, After Life

Richard Koh Fine Art Singapore is pleased to present Still Lives, After Life, the first solo exhibition in Singapore by Ugo Li. The exhibition brings together a new body of paintings that revisit the still life tradition through questions of temporality, residue, and quiet persistence.

In Still Lives, After Life, Ugo Li approaches still life not as a composed arrangement but as a condition that emerges after use. Tables appear after meals, vases remain after flowers, and surfaces bear the traces of routine rather than desire. These scenes exist in suspended moments, where objects persist beyond their immediate function.

Stillness in these works is not decorative but temporal. The paintings hold the aftermath of lived moments without recourse to narrative or memory. What remains is form, functional, understated, and subtly displaced. Ordinary domestic objects such as plates, bottles, fruit, and furniture are rendered with attentiveness, oscillating between fragility and endurance. Modest materials coexist with ornamental forms, and familiarity carries symbolic weight. Value is not determined by preciousness but by duration.

Working primarily in oil and pastel on canvas, Li’s practice is rooted in improvisation and process. His paintings evolve through multiple layers of application, erasure, and revision, allowing motifs to surface and recede over time. This method resists fixed meanings and opens space for associative and personal readings. Words and signs occasionally appear within the compositions, not as explanations but as pictorial elements that further loosen interpretation and invite reflection.

Across the exhibition, everyday objects are neither idealised nor sentimentalised. They are observed with restraint and quiet attention. Still Lives, After Life proposes a space in which things outlive their users, where form becomes a final witness. This is not a meditation on absence, but on continuity and what remains.

UGO LI (b. 1987) is a French painter based in Rouen, France. His improvisational practice blends memory, emotion, and lived experience through layered painting processes. Combining abstraction, signs, and visual fragments from contemporary culture, his dynamic compositions transform words, colors, and forms into poetic surfaces that explore pictorial dialogue and perception.