State of the Arts: Weiyi Li’s Show at Hive Center “More a Selfie Than a Personal Statement”
State of the Arts is our regular arts column whereby we take a look at the newest moves in Beijing's creative scene and highlight art news as well as exhibitions, artists, and openings that you should seek out.
Weiyi Li is an entity who manifests in several avatars: artist, designer, publisher, curator, and retailer. All of these identities bend and blur through her cross-disciplinary displays that comprise her latest show titled Personal Statement at Hive Center for Contemporary Art, on exhibit until Jan 20.
Originally from Changsha, Hunan province, Weiyi Li’s show is not your traditional variety of artistic statement. More than focusing on didactic narratives of why she does what she does or explaining explicityly to the viewer what the exhibition entails, Li confronts the audience with her work so as to allow them a peek into her mind, her thought process, and the references that trigger and feed her intellectual curiosity (this is supplemented by the catalog and essays she has compiled to accompany the show). As a result, we see a sort of magnified and multi-medium selfie that makes us feel, in the artist's own words, as if we are “hacking into her cell phone [or] browsing through her WeChat records.”
Aside from the explicit "showing" portions of the exhibition, you should also be prepared for a lot of linguistic and semiotic play. The artist is known for her interest in the use of language and the relationship that it has with (wo)manmade objects. So when you see a piece that somehow looks too literal, ask yourself: “What sort of twist is this concealing through wordplay or semantics?” You'll find then that more often than not, some sort of trickery has been utilized.
An example would be Li's pieces "Bluetooth" (2016), which hints at how language doesn’t translate well when materialized in physical objects, and in a broader sense – perhaps at the expense of being less visually engaging – "in no need to carve a stone in a bird" (2017), reminding us that art mostly exists wholly intertwined with agency and intention, like naming something and affixing an idea even if it doesn’t necessarily ‘correspond’ to what you’re seeing.
The artist’s own image is also a recurrent element in the exhibition, with her voice – the audio from a video excerpt taken from an impromptu performance the artist held at MoMa in the winter of 2010 – on repeat in the first hall alongside Li's heavily-manipulated 3D model as a heroic standing figure and bearing an uncanny resemblance to "La Gioconda". Furthermore, in the double channel piece "The Lovers" (2017), Li prints her face onto silk scarves which she asks a couple to wear while they kiss, thus re-enacting René Magritte’s work of the same name. The result is a self-voyeuristic moment which Li describes as an “out-of-body experience” for herself, and creates a strangely captivating, on account of being slightly perverse, moment for everyone else.
Take your time to explore Li's many other works, a number of which display insightful takes – in a genuinely engaging way – relating to people’s perception of “computer-doctored images.” Complement your wandering, if finances allow, with a copy of the exhibition’s catalog (RMB 30) in which the artist uses the third person to describe some of her ideas, anecdotes, or random thoughts behind the pieces exhibited – a good and worthwhile read indeed.
Photos: GJ Cabrera
