Li Ziqi is a Chinese video creator whose self-produced films of rural life became an internet phenomenon in the late 2010s. Filming alone in her grandmother’s village in Sichuan, she documents everything from hand-making paper and furniture to cultivating crops and cooking elaborate seasonal meals. Each video is meticulously crafted, paced slowly, and suffused with a quiet reverence for tradition, labor, and landscape.
Her work operates somewhere between art, documentary, and performance. While ostensibly instructional, the films are also aesthetic compositions: long shots of mist over bamboo groves, the rhythm of chopping vegetables, the color of freshly dyed cloth. Without narration, they present a vision of self-sufficiency and care that feels both timeless and contemporary.
Li Ziqi’s videos elevate practices often dismissed as domestic or mundane into rituals of craft and relation. In a digital culture dominated by speed and distraction, her slow cinema of rural life offers an alternative rhythm, one that reframes survival and beauty as inseparable, and suggests that the future may also be found in tending what has always been here.
