As I'm standing in the quiet calm of the Farringdon gallery, nestled in an old London city building, I can hear Vaughan’s vocals ringing in the backs of my ears. Across his recent body of work, Kin Ting Li has developed a series of mysterious, smokey, undulating landscapes. Their aesthetic reference pendulums between 20th century painting and glossy contemporaneity, at times echoing Chagall or the Italian futurists. Each canvas is thick with re-working, providing a bolstered, geographical surface for crisp poetic line-like forms to navigate. Using a similar device to Vaughan, these forms wander a questioning plod through a spectral terrain, a required guide that leads us through the works but opposingly, dispels and questions the very surface that supports them. This opposition rings the paintings with a vibration that I visualise as slow-motion, oscillating cymatic patterns reaching across the void space of the gallery, bouncing from painting to painting, escaping through windows. Audibly, they cast shadows of the analogue circus soundscape of Peter Brook’s 1970 production of A Midsummers Night Dream. It feels as though Li has forced this cymatic energy into each canvas and somehow fixed it there, particularly in the exhibition’s white paintings Floaters and Reinvigoration [both 2024], that feel like avalanches frozen in motion, bulging outside of their own remit, becoming almost bodily. They are calmed by Li’s intricate use of colour that glazes across the snow-rock surface, refracting the full colour spectrum like gentle morning sun on ice.

There are moments throughout ‘All or Nothing at All’ where Vaughan abandons her questioning tone and we are led towards possible resolve, particularly when recounting memory. Again, a device mirrored in Li’s works Insinuation 2022-2024 and Safe Space, 2024 where the predominant forms become more recognisable. This tease of recognition gives the more abstracted works their power, heightening the desire to pry into every crevice of the painted texture.

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