Yilin Li is a conceptual artist based in Shenzhen, China. Her interdisciplinary art practice is inspired by her domestic and transnational migration from the village to cities across China and America. Working with basic materials that have personal connections, she creates sculptures, installations, videos, and performative works to explore the themes of memory and root-searching by bridging the past and the present, especially the impact of commercialization, artificial making, and estranged labor.
Searching the Roots, Performance, Duration: 4 min 29 sec
There is an idiom "Fallen leaves return to their roots" in Chinese culture. Inspired by my domestic and transnational migration from the village to cities across China and America, I traveled back to the Chinese village where I was born to search for my “roots.” I excavate like an archeologist, digging deep to find the past. This performance explores the origin of memory, root-seeking, as well as the nodal points of the past and the present.
Grass Lover, Performance Duration: 4 min 26 sec
To protect the field grass from removal by the bulldozer, I wore a faux fur costume in green, and filled a 5-gallon backpack sprayer to “save” the entire land. By applying a sisyphean task to slow down the removal, I express the complex relationship between nature and estranged labor
Saving An Old Tree, Video Duration: 8 min 09 sec
Saving an old tree is a documentary that films an old worker attached scaffolding to a standing burned tree in a soon-to-be-developed land. At the expense of urbanization, trees were burned down. In parallel to the worker's forced-to-retire trajectory, I reappropriate the land as a scaffolding construction site to rethink the concepts of development, labor, and nature, while questioning the relationship between humankind and nature.
