Tim Li: Portraits from the Deep

Tim Li: Portraits from the Deep

3 May – 3 June 2025

DEPOT 3 Vic Road
3 Victoria Road, Devonport

Exhibition Opening:
Saturday 3 May, 5–7pm

Image Credit: Kōura papatea / spiny rock lobster MK5, Ink on cotton archival grade paper, 2023. Courtesy of Tim Li.

Gyotaku Demonstration & Artist Talk

Tim will be giving a gyotaku demonstration and artist talk at the exhibition opening taking place on Saturday 3 May, 5-7pm. This is a great opportunity to meet our exhibiting artist and enjoy some lovely refreshments courtesy of our hospitality partners.

Photo Credit: Ricky Situ

About the Exhibition

Portraits from the Deep showcases a collection of illustrations and gyotaku prints by Kāpiti based artist Tim Li.

From the humble kina to macabre creatures of the darkest depths, Tim’s work forces us to slow down and appreciate the aesthetic grandeur of our marine taonga. In an age where everything is seen through a filter, the ocean’s inhabitants aren’t something you can simply experience through social media and the bombardment of fast imagery we are so privy to. You have to immerse yourself in Tangaroa’s world to truly appreciate the beauty and complexity of our endemic marine species.

Tim’s honest, meticulous and truthful representations are offered as an antidote to a growing brag-culture egged on by social media. Too often, publicly shared images of fish are deconstructed into objects of status, or ego-baiting. Tim offers these precise, magnified representations as objects of fascination; to be admired and appreciated with a botanical reverence. Nature here is returned to a space beyond kill-culture. If art can be said to save lives, Tim’s work opens conversations of sustainability, resource management, respectful practices and even gratitude.

Each individually honed piece is a monument to the ocean, and a challenge to the “plenty more fish in the sea” mindset. Rare, treasurable and revered are truer descriptions of both the ocean and Tim’s work.

About the Artist

Tim Li is a full time Kāpiti based artist who produces hyper-realistic graphite illustrations and gyotaku fish prints of Aotearoa’s marine species. Growing up in Taupō at a fish and chip shop, Tim spent his afternoons drawing inspiration from the iconic New Zealand fish species poster, and this is where his fascination for the underwater world started.

His drawings display dramatic monochrome contrast, delicate attention to line detail and true representation of coarse and fine organic textures. While this process involves a controlled, meticulous approach to mark making, gyotaku forces Tim to surrender control to some degree. Tim finds the unpredictability of the inking and printing process intriguing and somewhat addictive. The immediacy of gyotaku counters the laborious nature of his drawings, dividing his time between both these technical approaches in his practice.

As a regular diver and spearfisher, Tim is conscious of being respectful of the life he takes, only harvesting what his whānau needs and using as much of the fish as possible, extending this utilisation into the realms of art. In direct response to the pervasiveness of trophy hunting spurred on by social media, his artwork is seen as a practice that takes away the focus from the act of killing and instead pays homage to the beauty of the fish by documenting its unique existence, acting as a record of that fish in a certain point in time.

timliart.com | @timliart

Tim Li: Portraits from the Deep is presented in partnership with Printopia Festival 2025