
In his practice, Yong Xiang Li draws on a diversity of media. His main interest, however, lies in the border-crossing intersections between painting, sculpture, music and video. Influenced by a reciprocal understanding of culture and diaspora experience, the artist challenges ideas of sovereignty and existing power-structures by engaging in contaminations that aim at media, formal and cultural specificities.

Yong Xiang Li works with three-dimensional painting. Citing the aesthetic history of exoticism in Western art and design, and the mistranslation of aesthetics of the “Far East”, Li offers a pluralistic exploration of the politics of surface. In this, the surface is always placed “in relation to” or “in service of” to queer the power relation between the decorative, the object and labour.

Li’s figurative painterly practice brings to life protagonists that linger in alternate states of object- and subject-hood. Here, meticulously constructed painted surfaces are commonly set in dialogue with their surroundings and their often sculptural support. The resulting spatial-temporal peculiarities point to the hybrid flows of cultural histories that constitute the works’ existence and defy easy categorizations. Moreover, the artist engages heterogeneous painterly styles to attempt a “queer inhabitation” of acknowledged art history: an exploration of queer subjectivity and agency mediated through a series of assimilations, dis-identifications and transmutations.

Deborah Schamoni

Berlin

Rainer Wild Art Foundation Award

Goteborg International Biennial

Göteborg

Shanghai Biennial

Shanghai

Basel

Art Basel

Paris

PARIS +

Beijing

Art Beijing

London

Sadie Coles HQ

Antenna Space

Munich

Long March Space

Tbilisi

Lc Queisser

Schwabinggrad

Vienna

Galerie Emanuel Layr

Frankfurt am Main

Jean Claude Maier

Ullens Center For Contemporary Art - Ucca

Hannover

Kestnergesellschaft

Wiesbaden

Kunsthaus Wiesbaden

Bonn

Bundeskunsthalle Bonn

Power Station of Art

Portikus

Mannheim

Kunsthalle Mannheim

Prague

FUTURA

Yong Xiang Li

Städelschule

Central Saint Martins University of Art and Design

Hydraulic Masc 1

Study for "Hydraulic Masc