ME, WE, WOMEN

Li: The live performance consists of projections of a character and live performance of the same character. In the big white space, the character is always moving her body and trying to paint over the shadows white again, pearls are stuffed loosely between the character’s legs. The audience can control the sound by selecting songs from YouTube. The movement of the character varies as the environment changes, more pearls drop when movement we’re strenuous. The complex presentation of the performance piece was similar to our daily life, simply in different appearances. I tried to portray the moment of everyone’s witness within the time of the performance. The useless painting session is an everlasting peruse of perfection no matter how the external varies and internal suffers. The distance of specific belong and dispatch of connections were reconstructed and scripts out from the character’s body language.

Li: Everything lives comes from an ovum.

The idea is that each female has a fully formed microscopic being within her eggs, and each of these microscopic beings who are female has submicroscopic eggs within them containing the next generation, etc. The Ovum theory of life was one view of human generation from the Renaissance to the 18th century. The other, which goes back to the Classical era, was the homunculus theory, a spermatozoic model, where the male sperm contained a tiny human that would go and lodge in an egg to incubate.

Me, we, women are sharing partial the same experience from the society. The perspective is overlapped from time to time, we are bounded by strong empathy. We are viewing the world in tenderness yet most powerful lens, bringing up the realism beneath our daily life.

Li: About this piece of performance, the presentation of blinking questions and characters were my previous attempt of artist statement, a successful leakage of emotion rush and documentation, a failure of the artwork description. Its existence has a meaning and I adore it and proud of it, to stand as an immersive chapter. This all describes omne is a heavy emotional and content wide piece.

Curator: The multimedia work in Chinese characters sets out a series of inquiries covering the topics of humanity, isolation and self-reflection. For example, “Why is the pearl being cracked out of the shell, like the legs being forced to open, just to make humans shine”; “Why am I the farthest person from the sun”；”Why I deadly miss home but never find one?”.

Li:

What if I grow up here, what if I’ll live in France, the United States, or Planet what difference would it make. So, will I be a different person, or will I hold a more fluent spirit? I have no idea but I know now wherever I go I’ll be always longing for a place called home, a concept of the motherland, a lack that would never be fulfilled…

Will you miss home;

Will you miss your mother;

Will you miss…

I would say I don’t know this kind of answer is not appropriate, and I’ll say I don’t know this kind of answer to be frank. We are educated to be born and linked to our homeland, to belong to a certain site, to have a meaning, we need to get spiritual to define ourselves. Where we are from, a link that can describe most of the past of a person is from the ground, certain square acres, and a name behind a culture. I’ll say one day when I was trying to introduce myself I fell from an enormous gap, by introducing the name and where I am from is not what I am.

The sensation of isolation is rooted within the education and nutrients of my consistency, I always wonder about the link and the purpose we create to make our life more meaningful, yet I am looking for my definition to the approach of self-understanding. Combining identity, gender, the connection with motherhood, the polish from society, what have I turned into and what will I never become.

Curator: Your art delves into the space of inner self, what is the role of gender in this exploration process? Do you identify yourself as a feminist?

Li: I never consider myself a feminist artist. What I do is combining self-experience and my reflections of the world into my artworks. Being a female, growing up in society is similar to any flavored cookies in the market, there are many flavors and experiences for different cookies, yet it cannot change the content of what it is. It’s common when some audiences would category me into a feminist artist, I just make works starting from my lens of perceiving the world, the environment would shape all of the contents in the womb. I want to create more works that speak out louder and more sincere (I don’t like to use this word, but it does meet my request. A lively example about my feminist?).

About the Performance, Li says:
“It is a mix blend of video and performance I started the performance subtly the night before the audience arrives. I had moved my bed into a public space of the gallery. One side was exposed to a bay window, overlooking grass and forest. The other side of the bed was in the gallery, facing the public in a judgmental and manipulated site. The video looped three times in the space I live in. Every time it starts and ends, it motivates me to start and end my mundane life routine, but the desire to be out of the preferred space is always happening. There is an interaction with the larger community who can see me in my bed through the window outside of the building. Outside my realm, the actions of the audience vary based on their own personal consideration and background. This piece, in particular, also deals with the community issues of mental health issues.”

About the Performance, Li says