Theory of Colours

Joint winner of the Tafeda Best Designed Independent Book in the 70th Australian Book Design Awards 2022
Shortlisted for the Small Press Network Book of the Year 2022
Shortlisted in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2022

The colours recorded by the spectroscope are the inverse of the true colours, which float in the pupil after the eye has closed.

Theory of Colours takes as its title and point of departure the influential nineteenth-century treatise on colour by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. In Li’s third full-length collection, colour — and its absence — is at once subject, structural principle and medium.

Moving from the distant past, through the fleeting, unstable present, and into a series of speculative futures, the book elaborates worlds both familiar and strange — a country estate, a small town, a grand hotel, a tower.

Informed by the spectral practices of early photography and cinema, as well as the visual and thematic conventions of ghost stories, westerns and science fiction, Li’s narratives of text and image are unsettling explorations of sequence and time, absence and haunting.