Xianzhuyue Li's 'Floating Homes, Moving Lives' at Four Corners Gallery

London-based photographer Xianzhuyue Li's solo exhibition 'Floating Homes, Moving Lives' at Four Corners Gallery in July 2026 documents life on Britain's inland waterways. The series, comprising portraits, domestic interiors, and details of waterways, explores how home, identity, and belonging are constructed through mobility, memory, and everyday routines. Li's restrained visual approach avoids exoticizing canal life, instead revealing the paradox of a home that remains constant while its location changes. The work engages with theoretical frameworks: bell hooks' 'homeplace' as a site of care and resistance, Gaston Bachelard's poetics of space, Michel Foucault's heterotopia, Tim Cresswell's politics of mobility, Doreen Massey's relational place, and Henri Lefebvre's social production of space. Li also highlights regulatory constraints, such as the British Waterways Act 1995 and Canal & River Trust guidance requiring continuous cruisers to move every 14 days. The exhibition situates canal living within broader economic, political, and social structures, resisting both narratives of housing precarity and romanticized freedom.