Skylines and Turnstiles (I)

Shuang Li’s artistic practice produces work dealing with geopolitics, digital media, sexuality and gender. For the online exhibition project In This Layered World, All Perception Is Real (2020), she presented If Only the Clouds Knows, an interactive web installation which began from the ubiquity of electronic storage devices (cell phones, hard drives, cloud storage, etc.) and addresses their influence on human memory. Her annual edition Skylines and Turnstiles refers to the connection between desire and commodity fetishism. It consists of paintings made from yellow warning vests, which Li uses to distill global processes. Yellow vests, as everyday objects, are thus charged with affective and political meaning. Against this background, Li highlights tensions between supply and demand, the history of production and the circulation of goods, in order to reflect on the longings, desires, and fears of a changing global society. A particular feature of her annual edition is its appearance: Li, as digital native, has an artistic approach which combines internet-based technologies with analog processes, thus making reference to tensions between affective charges and physical chains of production.