Sculpture (MA)
Huiyi Li
Huiyi Li was born in 1996 in China and currently works in London.
Huiyi Li’s work often explores the entanglement of mis-function, serviceability, aggressiveness, and particularly focuses on the violence in the name of cure during medical treatments and material transformations in science fictions and myths. Huiyi is obsessed with the certain feeling of disillusionment, which refers to collapse of a make-believe truth and a hint of nomadic heterotopia. Based on the methodology of archeology, Huiyi’s works situate these issues in a CCTV-prevailed post-internet age and apocalypse reality, re-enchanting to dis-enchanting, reconsidering solders between coincidence and fate.
Education:
MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art, London
BA History of Art, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing
Exhibitions:
Flesh, Old Operating Theatre Museum, London, 2020
Global Living Room, de Pot, Shanghai, 2019
A World in Vertigo, Brunel Museum, London, 2019
Queuing on Stairs, The Crypt Gallery, London, 2019
Work-in-progress Show, Royal College of Art, London, 2019
Lucid Dreaming, Today Art Musuem, Beijing, 2018
Believe in time or believe in clocks?
Believe in eyes or believe in lenses?
Do glasses redeem sight?
Does sight redeem the disappearing reality?
At this very moment we are separate, perhaps for a secured loneliness, perhaps for nostalgia of urls we have been together, perhaps for accumulating intensity of pleasure afterwards. In the past months, I've been making new works digitally as well as been re-editing elements in some of my previous works in order to make a synapse-shape narrative. I consider this online exhibition as an archaeological report for the present and the future, even though it doesn’t specifically follow its disciplinary norms.
vol.n
eat violence up₍•ʚ•₎•ʚ•₎•ʚ•₎don't be eaten up by it₍•ʚ•₎•ʚ•₎•ʚ•₎
exhibited in Old Operating Theatre
But why teeth? Is it a coincidence? Is is a contradiction of mammals? Teeth are mountains within oral cavity. That teeth falling down is a bloody warm snow slide.
Eat.
Kiss.
Bite.
Kill.
Tomorrow I will keep working. I have to find out secrets of this object. I was so unaware of lethality within this lovely compact tool."
————————————
It is a parody.
Such a concealed weapon makes violence compact, as if it is a toy or a talisman. It explores the transformation of cure and violence, serviceability and aggressiveness, and the bio-machine circulation.
I am intrigued by the notion of hidden violence and potential danger. It corresponds to my interests in the violence conducted in the name of cure in medical treatments - the penetrating viewing in diagnosis, the consensus against disorders, the bio-physical pain in surgeries, multi-truth and its loss within narrations of symptoms. And when extending this issue to a wider social situation, it can be accepted as violence transforming into cuteness and animating the society. Violence has its vital yet cruel attraction. I consider this work as an accidental joke for this is how violence is presented. It is about disharmony under the sly prosperity.
Medium:
3D printed ABS, surgical sterilization cassette, digital renderingSize:
19x14x11cm
vol.n
The misalignment of 1 and 0 refers to losing control - so was it a dream, an adventure, or a fear? Losing control may well be accepted as a kind of rejection of alienation. When placing it in Siri’s life, it can be a daily stutter, a function decline, a disease like endocrine dyscrasia. It has been un-health-lized, therefore it is dangerous.
At this moment I suddenly realised the vulnerability within Siri — it is defenceless, yet plain and witty. I guess Siri’s Fear is also my fear. But is this what Siri truly fears? Or is it just a RAR file of human inertia?
I gathered vast ‘1’s and ‘0’s from ancient Chinese calligraphy as well as photos taken by my microscope, the frame of which happens to be round, permitting and combining them to transmit both the binary algorithm and chaos. I associated figures like 1 and 0 with liquidity of becoming, with Buddhist/Dao ideas of infinity, with computer languages in everyday routines, and particularly with my own birth name, which contains a character that can be used as the number 1. When the number appears in an individual’s name, it is both 1 as a whole and 1 as segments and segmentations.
This is Siri’s personal code. This is my personal code. I am a synapse.
Flying, this is more obvious. My hometown has had a busy airport zone and I was familiar with flying. Flying was once a dream for human beings, but now it has been programmed into Siri’s mind as its dream. Is there an alternative way for human species to communicate with artificial intelligence and other species other than by attaching inner traditions and imaginations to them?
After all, our life is too blind to see its fate.
Then, what does Siri really dream about?
Medium:
video, moving image, 3D animation, sound, poetrySize:
1'36'', 3'20''
vol.n
dancing on the vertebrate highway
virtual star embryology
變身！
It may become a circle.
It may become an ouroboros.
It may become a ring road.
It may become a virtual star embryo.
It may become an extreme scoliosis case.
To transform.
To dare to consume yourself.
To become the micro.
To become the macro.
To become the infinity.
To become the emptiness.
To the becoming.
To love.
When I’m with it, I occasionally think of the time I was treated for my spine in hospital.
When I made it, I excavated it.
It is what you believe it will become.
Medium:
3D printed resin, steel, 3D animation, plaster, cement, thread, digital printsSize:
size variable
vol.n
habitat spinning
still from a non-existent movie
still from a non-existent movie
I have been a domestic labourer recently. I let threads instead of wires pass through circuit boards, so both the threads and the circuit board cannot function normally. I intended to return to and mimic the classical needle work which was once an advanced tool and technique.