Li Chen is a Chinese documentary filmmaker and visual artist working with moving image, photography, writing, and installation.

Li’s artistic research probes the troubled social-political situation in a censored society by reimagining the unique Asian cinematic device, the ‘empty shot’ (空镜头). Drawing theoretical inspiration from East-West philosophy—Taoism and feminist new materialism—as well as feminist postcolonial sociology at the intersection of memory studies and trauma studies, she reconceptualises the ‘empty shot’ as an expanded language in film and visual art that is imbued with both aesthetic ambiguity and political resistance. Her research is twofold. First, it aims to document and articulate the psychological costs of censorship. Second, it seeks to transform the empty shot into a deliberate counter-narrative that revolts against authoritarian narrative control. In her research project, she employsautoethnography, image-making, critical theory and experimental writing to explore how silenced entanglements of history, memory, and trauma are materially inscribed and how landscapes and non-human elements depicted by empty shots might contribute to salvage censored histories.