Yong Xiang Li

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 is a contemporary art gallery based in Munich, Germany. Situated in a 1970s villa, the gallery is able to offer its artists a spacious white cube, flooded with daylight and opening up to a greened outdoor area, as well as an independent smaller room. Since its founding in 2013, the gallery has focused on showing and supporting emerging international artists and it presents an exceptional program that unites international positions with a subversive and self-reflexive approach to art making considering the complexity of human coexistence. The gallery often stages the first shows of upcoming international artists in Germany. The program is developing a distinct profile with artists like Maryam Hoseini, Yong Xiang Li, and Flaka Haliti, who investigate the sociopolitical conditions of queer identity and gender, and share a diasporic experience in their works. Beyond its international focus, the gallery has been playing an important part in establishing Munich as a prominent destination for contemporary art and its discourses. ...