Xinyi Li is a jewelry artist and educator currently pursuing her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work explores perception, emotional control, and structural tension through contemporary metal techniques and digital modeling. With a background in both traditional fabrication and CAD design, she has created production-ready models for luxury brands like Cartier and De Beers at XOMOX Jewelry.

Her recent internship at Susan Freda Studio deepened her engagement with woven wire sculpture and mokume-gane techniques. Xinyi has taught undergraduate jewelry courses at RISD and exhibited at institutions including the Kentucky Museum and the Nicolaysen Art Museum. Her cross-disciplinary research draws on both material experimentation and cultural inquiry.

Some truths or structures only disclose themselves from specific perspectives or through particular actions; when approached from other angles, they may appear absent, contradictory, or unstable. Our cognition of objects is thus not grounded in some universal, neutral view, but rather supported by our “ways of using” or “positions of observation.”

What one perceives as structure or meaning is deeply contingent—not only on spatial orientation, but also on the bodily gestures, movements, and perceptual habits that frame the act of looking. In this sense, meaning is not a fixed property residing within the object itself, but a dynamic relation that emerges between observer and object, continually shifting as our vantage points, practices, and cultural teachings change.