January 20, 2026

Nanna Li: Reckoning with Sweden

Yul Cho, Letian Lois Ding, Ruoxi Gao in conversations with Nanna Li 

We all came across Nanna Li’s work in different ways, but it was her master’s presentation at Konstfack that really brought it all together. Nanna told us her story that started with a classic Swedish house, red with white corners, like the ones in children’s books. Then came images of her own face and body, drawn, pressed onto paper, repeated, and reworked. She picked up familiar images and turned them into something that speaks about what it is like to grow up Asian in Sweden and to find words for experiences too often overlooked. They were boldly raw and reassuring both at once.

Nanna was born in China. She moved to Luleå at age three. She left for the UK at eighteen and spent over ten years there. She returned to Sweden in 2017. Nanna has worked in illustration, comics, and game development and is now finishing her MFA in Visual Communication at Konstfack.

A month after her presentation, we sat down with Nanna at her studio, surrounded by her works. We talked about belonging, the slowness of connection in Sweden, and what it means to claim a place, or be claimed by it.

YUL: I like how you play with the colours in your self-portraits. How do you normally choose your medium and materials? Do you have your own approach, or is it more that it speaks to you?

NANNA: I think it’s mostly about limitations and what I have in front of me. My daughter is three now. I made many of those self-portraits in the first year of her life. My time was so limited. It became about what I literally have in front of me. What do I have in the house? 

And now it’s still about working with limitations. I need to pick her up some days. My time needs to be split. Weekends are not really breaks. So my creative process is constantly interrupted. A lot of it is just asking what I can get done, but that also works for me. This project has been about coming back to connection with my own creativity, working with more tactile things, things in the room.

What I keep coming back to is something about using the hand, using the body, and moving. In painting, there’s movement. I do yoga as well, and love dance and embodiment practices – to learn how to be more present in my body. I think it’s somehow all one – the connection to body, painting using the body, putting yourself in your work and using body to sense the world.

YUL: Do you have a moment when you realised you were going to work with your own experience? Or did it come naturally?

NANNA: I don’t think it was a choice. The themes I’m working with right now came up after I had my daughter. It was quite a tough time, the months after she was born. It brought up a lot of psychic material. I had to examine certain things. It wasn’t just around my identity. It was everything: my relationship to work, to my partner. It’s like waking up one day and thinking, ‘What choices have led me here?’

So in a way, it was there. It was fertile ground. Then I came into Konstfack. I didn’t realise at the time, but the program is designed to poke at you. It asks you to go where it hurts and where it glitters – that was one of the assignments. It asks you to look critically at things and bring yourself to it.

I didn’t set out to do personal work. But for every assignment, even before the project properly started, personal stuff came up. It was just the material I ended up with. It was there. It was the thing I felt I had to make work about. It was the thing that was most alive, I guess.

Right now, in this phase, it just seems to be what’s here. Just being in Sweden. It’s always there. Every day when I walk around my neighbourhood – it’s always there.

YUL: How has it been working with these themes at Konstfack and in Swedish art institutions?

NANNA: I think people have been very supportive. The class and the teachers. They say this is quite a kind program compared to other art schools. I think they encourage people to be personal. But for me, it’s still a bit of a battle: how much to show myself in this space, which is public. It’s not a private sphere. There’s this worry of overexposing.

A classmate of mine talked about this concept of trauma porn. People love consuming trauma. I’m trying to stay aware of this. I want to maintain dignity. As a minority, it’s easy to end up explaining oneself to one’s surroundings, rather than making work that I want to make. It’s a tricky balancing act. I want to talk about things that are hard because they need to be said, but not wallow in it. Speak it as it is. It’s a constant balance between courage, vulnerability, and feeling into ‘What do I have the capacity to share right now?’

I think about the culture. My parents grew up during the Cultural Revolution. They studied engineering. I just read a graphic novel by Emei Burell – she lives in the UK now, but her mom is Chinese, and she grew up in Sweden. There was a line in the book about her mom - “She chose engineering because engineering was the safest. 1+1 is always 2.” 

I think my parents sent me similar signals when I was younger, and I studied engineering too. For me, speaking so personally, speaking my truth, is scary on many levels – but also important at this point in life.

YUL: If I remember correctly from your presentation, you were born in China and then moved to Sweden?

NANNA: Yeah, Luleå. I moved there when I was three. Then I left when I was 18 to study in the UK. I spent about ten years there, then came back to Sweden in 2017. I had a gap. I left Sweden behind. Then I came back.

When I was younger, my dream was to work as an artist and travel the world. At one point, I was in Serbia working for a games studio. I thought, this is the dream. But I felt this emptiness. I realised that it wouldn’t matter where I go in the world, I’m going to feel this emptiness.

That’s when I became curious about Sweden again. I left when I was so young. What is Sweden really like as an adult? As a kid, I had all these beautiful stories. If you met me in London, I’d say that Sweden’s great. And to some degree, that’s true. But there’s a lot of nuance that wasn’t there.

YUL: I grew up in Korea but have lived most of my adult life abroad. I don’t feel fully Korean – I stepped away from certain values and parts of the culture. And here in Sweden, I don’t feel fully part of the society either. Would I ever, even if I lived here my whole life? I’m not sure I ever would.

LOIS: I was reading about the concept of diaspora for my thesis. A lot of people, like those still living in China or Korea, might hear that word and think it means a group always longing to return home. But it’s actually much more personal. It’s this feeling of wandering, of being in and out of places without ever fully belonging to any of them. You feel detached, like an outsider. It’s not necessarily about wanting to go back or find where you belong. Sometimes it’s just permanent, like you’re forever in the middle.

NANNA: I came back to Sweden looking for something. I can do Swedishness very well. I can pass culturally. I know the traditions. I know how to make bullar. I know the holidays, how to celebrate them. I know to eat herring when we’re supposed to. But still – do I belong here? 

I took a course from the Othering & Belonging Institute in San Francisco. They talk about belonging not as something passive, but as: Who do you claim, and who claims you? I really liked that. Do I claim Sweden? Maybe I’m trying to. I’m Swedish. Then I come to Sweden and it feels like Sweden doesn’t really claim me back. 

Or if they do, it’s conditional: if you erase all the Chinese stuff, because that makes us uncomfortable, then you can belong. For other minority groups, it’s even worse. Sweden doesn’t claim them at all. They’re literally trying to push them out. So it’s conditional.

Lately, I’m also opening up to: What else can we claim, other than nations? Countries always have their nation-building myths they’re trying to sell you. Can you belong to something else? Nature? The wider world? Something beyond borders? Can you belong to yourself? Your creativity? The people who resonate with you and want you in their lives?

YUL: That’s a really beautiful way to put it. I’ve never thought about it like that, but I guess I do it without thinking.

NANNA: That’s why I’ve been looking at nature in some of my paintings. What is it about Sweden that I claim? It’s not the politics. It’s not history. But I grew up here. I grew up in these landscapes, with this northern light. It’s beautiful. It’s etched in my retina. These sensorial experiences, I will always have a connection to them.

Maybe that’s what I want to get to in this work. Maybe that’s why I’m making publications. So I can write this down.

It’s so sprawling. I need to go through all these things to get to this point. This has been a process of examining the hurt, the disappointment, the feeling of betrayal, the breakages, and then coming to your own story.

RUOXI: It is often said by many countries that they’re blending different cultures. But it’s not a soup where everything blends well. It’s a salad. We are with each other, but we are still apples and oranges. We have dressing on us, but we are still ourselves. We don’t get mushed out and disappear. We take something with us on the way.

NANNA: I think Sweden has room to grow in that way. Right now, my work is about reckoning with my own identity and place in the world, but I also think that Sweden has an identity crisis of its own. Its image of itself is being tested.

So what you said about the salad – Sweden has a streak of wanting to be homogeneous. That makes it really difficult for people who have come, or are still coming, to find a niche. Do you want salad, or do you want soup? Do you want me to just get blended into you and become the same? A meatball?

I feel like that has been the Swedish style of integration. Get rid of all the stuff you are, and become like us. Only observe our values.

LOIS: I was wondering how you’ve experienced finding or building a sense of community in your context? 

NANNA: Through meeting others in similar contexts, I learned new things. Even though we share a lot, there are still differences. I grew up in the north, where there is very little diversity, while others had different experiences. That helps contextualise my work. It was almost like I had the experience of being an adoptee – often the only Asian in a homogenous Swedish environment. As a child, wanting to fit in, I wanted to become as Swedish as I could. My parents, our home and our food were the things that didn’t fit the picture. I’ve realised that there was a lot of shame there. 

But I’m really grateful that I’m starting to discover spaces for sharing our experiences –  rooms to talk about anything. Everyone is welcome to share. I’m glad those things exist. Sweden is so slow. The population density isn’t high. I’m guilty of it too. I’m not very active. The distances are far. Everyone is so far away. It takes time to reach critical mass. You have to meet people, get enthusiastic. But when the distances are so far and everything has to be pre-planned, there’s a sluggishness about movement.

Yeah, speaking of movement, I’ve been thinking about it in painting, but also just in how we reach each other. There’s this slowness in how people connect here. Maybe that’s just the climate. It’s cold. I think a lot of things shape the way Sweden is.