Deceptions by Ye Zeng Yi Li

The Soft Ruin of Seeing

Ye Zeng Yi Li’s portraits do not present their subjects as fixed or whole — they arrive through erosion. Altered by time, chemistry, and the ineluctable fragility of their surface, the photographs are not preserved moments, but living memories: partial, trembling, fraying at the edges. The instantaneity of the Polaroid collapses into slow decay, and in this very collapse, something more intimate appears. No documentation – an apparition. The figures are not posed but paused, caught mid-scene, in a breath, in an hesitation that denies closure.

The surface itself becomes language. Expired film, ruptured emulsions, bleeding colors — the material does not only host the image, it tells the story. Faces blur like names recalled in dreams, details sink into silence, and still, the portraits speak. Not with clarity, but with ache. They echo the emotional palette of Wing Shya — melancholic, cinematic — but veer into something more feral, more undone. Memory, here, is not cherished: it is weathered. It does not lie still.

This book forms a pact with its reader: we will see without needing to know. There is a dual blindness — artist and viewer alike, suspended in shared disorientation, searching without seeking resolution. What matters is not what is shown, but what is conjured in the failure to fully see. These deceptions, soft and deliberate, only pull us closer, invite us not to possess the image but to feel its vanishing, and in that vanishing, to recognize ourselves.

There is no nostalgia in these portraits, only the present in slow collapse, a soft ruin of seeing. Through the cracks in film and in memory alike, a deeper truth flickers: not what once was, but what remains when nothing stays. And perhaps, what is most human is not our clarity, but the way we reach for one another in the dark, feeling our way through what is left behind.