Contemporary Kazakhstani art historian, curator, and visual culture theorist, member of the Union of Artists of the Republic of Kazakhstan (since 1979), "Honoured Worker of Kazakhstan" (2020), member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) at UNESCO and the International Authors’ Association (ALAI), head of the NGO “Intellectual Property Laboratory” (Almaty), secretary of the Union of Artists of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and leading researcher at the Scientific Centre “Fine Arts of Kazakhstan” at the A. Kasteev State Museum of Arts.
Her works include articles, monographs, albums, and exhibition catalogues. Key methods in K. Li’s practice cover iconographic analysis, cultural-historical analysis, and the combination of anthropological and institutional perspectives. Key ideas are the material and visual culture of Kazakhstan, cultural identity, national artistic tradition, heritage, memory, nomadic culture, modernism, the Soviet past, institutionality, and authorship.
K. Li graduated from the Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University (Faculty of Foreign Languages, 1965), the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture of the Russian Academy of Arts (specialising in the theory and history of fine arts, Leningrad, 1975), and the M. O. Auezov Institute of Literature and Art of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR (postgraduate studies, 1986).
In her research, K. Li studies the nature and history of traditional art in Kazakhstan ("Kazakh Folk Art. Historiography of the Issue," 1992) and the influence of the legacy of the past on contemporary art and culture ("The Worldview Concept of Turkic Culture and Its Reflection in Kazakh Artistic Tradition," 1994). She analyses the strategies used to shape the visual language of art in Kazakhstan during the Soviet period ("Visual Art of Kazakhstan. 20th Century. Painting, Sculpture, Graphics, Contemporary Art," 2001). In this same context, she explores the work of the artists of the 1960s (“The Shestidesyatniki. Turkic Romanticism,” 2001) and how their art combines the symbolism of nomadic culture with elements of modernism. K. Li has also contributed to the preparation of albums of artists’ works and exhibition catalogues ("Aisha Galimbaeva. Illustrated Album," Almaty, 2008), including those dedicated to contemporary art ("Galym Madanov," Almaty, 1995).
Information about K. Li is stored in the collection of the Documentation project — the archive of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art – Almaty (SCCA).
Photograph provided by Kamilla Li