SHUANG LI
Born in rural China, Shuang Li makes video and sculptural works that explore the disconnect and cultural osmosis of the internet age, with its associated languages and visual codes.
Born in 1990 in rural, south eastern China, Shuang Li’s work is informed by the intimacy and absence that comes with forming an identity online in the 21st century. Her works concern themselves with fandom and community, refracted through the mediums of digital communication.
Her recent works have specifically evoked her relationship to the band My Chemical Romance growing up, encountering their work via bootleg CDs: this physical and cultural disconnect runs through much of her work, whether it is in the video work, Deja Vu, which investigates problems of language and the void of silence, or in Lord Of The Flies, a performance work she initiated in Shanghai while she was stuck in Europe during the pandemic, and which featured actors playing the artist and reading letters to her friends who attended the opening.
Presence and absence then, seem to be recurring themes in the work, even down to the conceit of fandom itself, a simulacra of closeness to an idol defined by an always unfilled fantasy of proximity.
We caught up with her just after the opening of her latest exhibition, at Karma in Zurich, to discuss her career so far.
FELIX PETTY
Hey, how's it going?
SHUANG LI
Hey, it's good. How are you?
FP
Yeah, I'm good. Thank you. How's your Sunday?
SL
It's okay. I was running around, but I just sat down.
FP
You just opened an exhibition, right?
SL
I just opened a show at Karma, in Zurich, and now I'm waiting for the train to go back home to Geneva.
FP
How was the opening? How was the show?
SL
It's cute. It's a group show. It's Zurich Art Weekend and the weekend before Art Basel, so it's a bit intense. I'm going to lie down on the beach next week.
FP
Whereabouts in Switzerland are you based, then?
SL
Geneva. But I don't know. We just lost our house. I'm between Geneva and Berlin, so, yeah, I'm mostly in Berlin these days. I’m trying to figure out where to be.
FP
You’ve been in Milan a lot this year, right?
SL
I had a show. I had a group show at Fondazione Prada, and then a solo show at the gallery.
FP
You’ve had a busy start to the year generally—these exhibitions in Milan, then you had a show in Zurich, a show in New York. How are you finding the business? Exhausting?
SL
It is, for sure. I'm just trying to get used to it. I used to be able to lock myself up and work on a show for a whole year. I could spend months at home working, not going anywhere or seeing anything. I can’t do that anymore. But then, this year, I’ve met so many artists I look up to, and become friends with some of them, like Sophia Al-Maria and Ryan Trecartin, and I’ve been able to see how they do things, and I'm really inspired by how they can have ten shows on at the same time.
FP
How did you get into making art? What were your first inspirations and motives?
SL
I didn't go to art school, but I always liked making little things. I didn't really consider them art—they were just little projects.
FP
Like what?
SL
I guess, looking back, they were kind of installations—things I could do in my room. I had a closet, and I would attach a sticker to the door; every time I opened it, it would break the sticker, and I’d have to make a new one. It was all interactive things like this. But I always liked writing. That’s where most of my work starts, especially if I’m working on videos: I write and do research, and the visuals come later.
I went to grad school in New York to do media studies, and I realized I wasn’t cut out for academia. I hated it.
When I graduated, I was a bit lost and confused, but I saw this show by Sophia Al-Maria at the Whitney, this installation called Black Friday, and I think that’s the moment I realized it was something I wanted to do.
FP
And what was your first exhibition that you did, the first works that you had finished and showed to the public?
SL
I think I randomly had a group show at Oberlin College. I don't remember how it happened. I think maybe a friend was curating it or something. So I went to Ohio.
FP
It’s kind of interesting that you mentioned writing as part of your process, because one thing I really love about your work is the role that titles and text plays within the work itself. The interplay between text and image feels quite central to the form your works take.
SL
I like to play around with these different elements. I don’t really care about filming, to be honest. I just film on my iPhone or work with a DOP. Editing is what I like. I like putting everything together. That's where the magic happens for me. Editing is like writing, in some way.
FP
Film and writing are both processes of editing—or, at least, both come to life through this process.
SL
Writing is also a really good tool for processing things. I’m so addicted to TikTok—I can be scrolling forever, and it feels like the world is spinning. Writing helps me bring me back to sanity.
FP
Do you write in Chinese or English?
SL
Both.
FP
Do you find the language you write in affects how or what you write?
SL
At Manifesto, I’m showing this work called Déjà Vu, and it's about how language is falling apart. The video was originally commissioning by the Canton of Geneva to be shown in the train station. So I cut it all up into two-minute-long chapters so people can watch it while waiting for a train.
But you can’t have any sound in the train station. That was the first prerequisite for the commission. And it was difficult, because sound is such a part of my videos.
So silence, or this void, became the central theme of the work. It’s about a town that is completely silent, and the history of the town. It starts with people forgetting words, mixing up the word for “apple” and “pear”—small mistakes of language that lead to bigger mistakes—and then, one day, they can’t speak anymore.
It’s kind of about how words don’t mean anything anymore.
FP
Your work, especially in the way it explores technology, is about both absence and transcendence, which kind of applies to language here too. By losing it, you transcend the need for it, and I think this is maybe a theme that runs throughout your work.
It's like how we define who we are: it’s very fluid, but also very fixed; we’re both trapped by it and use it to free ourselves.
SL
Yeah. That's so beautiful. For example, my show about My Chemical Romance, and fandom—I mean, I was such a big fan of that band. And the work also talks about discovering My Chemical Romance as a teenager in China, not speaking English, but not needing to speak English in order to understand.
FP
Yeah, exactly.
SL
Also, in terms of fandom in general, it's just fascinating for me. How do you literally transcend? Fandom in a way is the absence of the idol.
FP
Fandom is kind of like a yearning, right? It's like you feel, like, this need to be close to this idol, but there's always a distance and an absence and something that can't quite be bridged.
SL
You can never reach it, but you keep trying to reach.
FP
And, also, this is language as well, right? Language is always being used to describe something. You might use the word "apple" to describe an apple, but the word “apple” is never an apple. And it’s a bit like that exhibition of shows in Shanghai, at Antenna Space, which you couldn’t attend, but you sent people dressed as you to become the exhibition. You’re transcending yourself, but it’s also about absence and yearning and being separate.
SL
Yeah. I think I'm trying to find a way also against all this. I mean, my work is inspired or about technology to start with, but I think, recently, I realized it's ultimately against it in some way—not completely, but in some way. It’s against how claustrophobic the algorithm is. Everyone you know flattened into pixels… I think I’m trying to feel my way around the omnipresence of technology.
