CHINA ISSUE 603 Jun 2016

At the age of 13, magic came into Cherry Li’s life in the form of a blurry tree emerging on a white piece of paper submerged in a tub of liquid developer. Frozen in that moment, in her dorm-kitchen converted-darkroom in suburban California, Cherry knew it would be her life’s obsession to find magic in every mundane situation - and share that magic with the world. If she wasn’t sleeping, she was shooting; if she wasn’t shooting, she was printing; if she wasn’t printing, she was sleeping!

Immediately after graduating from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Cherry moved to Paris to pursue beauty and fashion photography. It was there, in her second home, that she found her life’s second obsession: food. Cooking and eating started to invade the time that she used to spend sleeping.

In 2012, when she moved to China to devote herself to shooting personal projects, she realised just how dear and personal eating was, and thus slowly allowed her palate to join her palette, to create a style of food photography that is intimate, delicious, and full of magic in every detail.