Born and raised in Mauritius, Catherine Li showed artistic talent from an early age, winning a comic strip competition organized by the Alliance Française during her secondary school years.

After completing her secondary education and spending two years teaching art and working as a textile stylist, she moved to Canada to study Fashion Design. During her studies at LaSalle College Montréal, she won first prize in the poster competition for the college’s annual fashion show. She also received an award at the National Fashion Competition in Canada and earned a scholarship in Fur Fashion Design in Denmark.

After more than two decades in Montreal, where she built a career as a fashion designer and discovered her passion for photography, she returned to Mauritius in 2016. Reconnecting with the island’s vibrant colors, luminous atmosphere, and natural beauty — all deeply rooted in her childhood memories — became a renewed and powerful source of inspiration. In 2019, she transitioned into fine art photography.

Catherine’s work explores the cultural and natural heritage of her native island, though her photography primarily focuses on capturing nature in all its diversity — from the humblest wild plants to the island’s lush landscapes and the ever-present ocean. With less than 2% of Mauritius’ endemic forest remaining intact, her work is driven by a strong desire to raise awareness about environmental preservation.

Her nature photography often takes shape in black and white, emphasizing lines, textures, and forms. In contrast to these visual explorations, she also seeks to capture the very essence of the island through abstraction — pursuing the intangible and the pure emotions of a fleeting moment or place, while stripping away unnecessary details and experimenting with chiaroscuro and bold, pure colors.

In her series Nature City, she brings these worlds together by layering photographs from her Essence and Nature series over images of cities built from concrete and steel. Through this work, she expresses her dream of urban spaces reclaimed by greenery and flowers — an allegory for healthier, more harmonious cities in balance with nature.

She has participated in numerous group exhibitions both locally and internationally, including artistic residencies at the Festival d’Arleo 2026, the Cape Town Photography Festival 2025, the 30th anniversary exhibition of Galerie Ilha Do Cirne, the Samudra Art Prize 2024, and World Ocean Day at the Alliance Française Dubai, among others.

Her Nature City series was featured in Open Eye Le Magazine, and her photographs have been published in the photo book Moris Ikonik by In Other Words, the book Les Îles Face au Défi Climatique by the Indian Ocean Commission, and Cultural Anthropology published by Cengage Learning in the United States.

Her artistic profile and work have also been featured in the international cultural magazine Mozaïk (August 2025), as well as in the cultural magazines Week End and Aparté. She regularly collaborates with interior architects and designers, integrating her photography into luxury hospitality and corporate spaces.

Her works are collected internationally by private collectors in Canada, France, England, Switzerland, South Africa, Hong Kong, and beyond.

VLFineart’s Vision: Through her photographic work, Catherine approaches nature within urban environments with softness and poetry. Her images invite viewers to develop a deeper sensitivity toward the living world, revealing the fragile beauty of landscapes, vegetation, and the environment that surrounds us.