(REVIEW) Inside the Modern Temple, by Zefeng Li

Hussein Mitha considers Zefeng Li’s installation Colonial Mentality, the debris of cultural artefact and cognitive dissonance. 

Zefeng Li’s exhibition, Inside the Modern Temple, at Saltspace Gallery in Glasgow, features an installation titled Colonial Mentality: a floor strewn with Tesco receipts, a The Sun stamped mini-Union Jack flag; a tiny novelty guitar, a transparent SHEIN bag, some twine, and other fragments of the detritus of late capitalist daily life. A curtain formed of strips of tabloid newspapers intersperses the back of the room; behind this tabloid tapestry on the far wall are displayed images of homes bulldozed and destroyed by the Israeli occupation in Masafar Yatta in the West Bank. The fact that visitors, myself included, might not be able to see past the surface, the curtain, the barrier, concretises the message of the visual metaphor, and drums home the point about the cognitive dissonance endemic to western subjectivity and the colonial atrocities it feeds, sustains and shields itself from. The curtain stands as a psychic prophylactic but its fragility offers the possibility of tearing it to shreds, returning it to the papery flotsam of the receipt-strewn floor, from which other returns-of-the-repressed might emerge. I find myself thinking of Kafka’s Odradek, of a creaturely consciousness stemming from the waste of the bourgeois order.

Returning to the main space, digitally produced images form a picture gallery around the space, interrogating various themes, tropes and cultural artefacts, with a sense of expansive philosophical and cultural exploration and observation: the Churchill statue of Parliament Square in London with pigeon atop, bird shit splattered on his head; a painterly image of a pig on trial referencing ‘the 1864 book Chambers Book of Days’, a Scottish compendium of “popular antiquities”; images resembling cells or microscopic life-forms sit next to figurative images with enigmatic titles The Scapegoat, or I need to tell someone. The recurring use of Leonard Cohen lyrics and a series of photographs of the artist lying down and running in green space give the work a poignancy that cuts through its more formally explorative and philosophical bent. 

‘Like a bird on a wire Like a drunk in a midnight choir I have tried in my way to be free.’

Li’s work comes with a lyrical dynamism and a philosophical curiosity that both creates images and ironises or interrogates the meaning of images at the current colonial conjuncture. 

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Text: Hussein Mitha

Image: Zefeng Li

Published: 11/08/25