Looking for the smallest pattern

Who I am

I’m Yama Li, a digital illustrator, painter and tattoo artist based in Medellín, Colombia. I sign my work as Yamalí. I work along the shore where art talks with science and philosophy, and my method fits in three verbs: observe a pattern, understand its cause, and turn it into beauty.

A way of looking

Everything I observe leads me to ask about the system that holds it: the flower leads me to the insect that pollinates it, the insect to the light that guides its flight, the light to the physics that explains it. And every system invites me to search for its smallest piece, the tiny pattern that, repeated over and over, builds an entire world.

I’m drawn to scientific words that carry poetry: resonance, entropy, event horizon. I handle them with care, the way you would hold glass, because their beauty grows once you understand what they mean.

What bees see

Bees perceive a band of light that stays invisible to our eyes: ultraviolet. Many flowers that look like a single color to us carry, in that light, markings that point the way to the nectar. That idea guides much of my work: the world has layers waiting for another kind of gaze.

In my illustrations I imagine those eyes: the colors beyond our reach, the nectar guides hidden in the petals, the hexagonal geometry of the honeycomb. I paint as if light spoke a secret language and every flower were a letter.

The reels

I share reels for artists and creative minds that bring together art, philosophy and science. Here, in this home, each reel has its own page with everything that doesn’t fit on social media: the science told slowly, the sources, the high-resolution illustration, the process and, when there’s cooking involved, the recipe.

Stay a while, look slowly, and ask questions with me.