May 2024 AIR: Xi Li
Xi introduces us to her process surrounding vast mediums
DeepEmotions(Tulips)
Hi Xi! It’s so fun to have you for the May residency at the lab! I can’t wait to talk about your work and process. How do you choose what medium to use when making your work, since you are so prolific in a range of mediums?
I see my practice as very image-centered. Within photography, video, and installation, my practice focuses on the process of image-making, distribution of photography and shifts of narrative within history and image culture both collectively and individually. The mediums I choose in my practice are considered as different surfaces (no matter if it’s three-dimensional or two-dimensional, or it's beyond time and space) that abstract and project different realities and imaginations back into each other. They work together connotatively and as a whole build a fuller perspective in a way to manifest my intention. They coexist and travel.
Your work has a huge sense of body, time and space. Can you tell us a little bit more about your process of creating an environment for the audience to enter into?
The making process has heavily relied on scanning, printing and reprinting. These staged scenes in my work are not merely documentation; they are created from memory. Images and experiences about those subjects in my head help me build these situations in the studio and get transferred to multiple surfaces. Then they laminate and reflect into one intricate surface (the image). When the viewer spends time wandering over the surface of a picture I made, the gaze works more continuously on a temporal level. The gaze scans, connects, empowers and reconstructs different elements I create in the pictorial space. While the viewer has the observer’s intentions, I manifest and construct a complex path to guide the viewer through the elements created in the pictorial space, signifying some elements by contouring, removing, duplicating or replacing physically. And to match the color and texture from the older printing techniques of the magazines and photographs, I embrace the way to make pictures at a slower pace with a few very old-fashioned hot lights and a 4x5 large format in my studio. But in the end, I still provide space for interpretation and would love to see how the viewer’s gaze decodes and produces relationships between elements of the images.
Mountains That Do Not Exist
Color, texture and layers are very visible in your work. Are you working from sketches, writings or drawings that you’ve made?
I spend a lot of time researching within different image archives and looking for old printed matters like family archives, magazines and other printed materials. I always start with some “study boards” on my studio walls where I research and collect all the visual (sometimes textual) resources needed. I don’t sketch on paper every time but for all the images made recently, I make sketch models with cupboards and printed images on paper so I can get a better idea of the space and scene I am creating.
How does form and content merge to further your ideas of the fallibility of memory?
Formally, I often employ techniques that disrupt traditional modes of representation, to raise questions about the reliability of the images and narratives presented to them. For example, I might manipulate photographic images through techniques such as fragmentation, replacement or reconstruction. By doing so, I disrupt the coherence and continuity of the visual narrative, reflecting the fragmented and malleable nature of memory itself. This visual fragmentation serves as a metaphor for the way memories can be distorted or reconstructed over time, influenced by subjective perceptions and external factors.
In terms of content, I draw upon personal memories, historical events, and collective experiences to evoke a sense of nostalgia, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Through juxtaposition and layering, I create a multiplicity of meanings and associations, inviting viewers to interpret and reinterpret the imagery in relation to their own experiences and perspectives.
What podcasts, films, artists keep you inspired to make the work you are making?
Different kinds of digital and physical image archive libraries. The Artist Project by The Met collection. Scholars' Rocks (Gongshi) and Chinese gardens. Fresco wall paintings and period rooms. Postcards and diaries. Writings about image study and image theory. Wolfgang Tillmans’s music albums. Thomas Demand’s model process and study. Kay Sage’s architectural nature paintings.
Installation Picture of Paper Scissors Rock_Cutting
Xi Li
Xi Li (b. 1995 Suzhou, China) is an artist who works with photography, video, installation and bookmaking to address the unreliability of image and the fallibility of memory, using methods of construction, simulation, intervention and refabrication, to consider the unstable harmony between actual and fictive recollections of the past, and to blur the lines in between. Xi has exhibited internationally in François Ghebaly in Los Angeles, AMANITA, Inna Art Space and Latitude Gallery in New York City, Aperture Gallery in London and MadeIn Gallery in Shanghai and will be included in the NAFI 2023 in the coming fall in China. Xi is the recipient of 2023 Creator Labs Photo Fund. Her self-published book Traces of Invisibilities has been shortlisted for Photo 2020 x Perimeter International Photobook Prize. Xi earned a Bachelor of Design from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art. Xi currently lives and works in New York.