YingYing Li
→ I embody the trees 2024
→ If the rope could speak 2023
→ 部屋 （Bedrooms）
→ Fruits, Forest, Fertility 2022
→ 👱 📲 🦋 💕 👧 2021
→ Life is great and I'm a calendar girl! 2021
→ Film Photography
→ I embody the trees 2024
→ If the rope could speak 2023
→ 部屋 （Bedrooms）
→ Fruits, Forest, Fertility 2022
→ 👱 📲 🦋 💕 👧 2021
→ Life is great and I'm a calendar girl! 2021
→ Film Photography
I secretly fell in love with a rope artist, a flower-loving woman. To me, a rope is more than just a rope; it’s an emotional attachment, a silent conveyance of love. The project If the rope could speak it’s a film photography-based work, experimenting with installation sculpture and Shibari art (Rope art). Adopting with elements of self-portrait to explore the struggles and implicit expressions of homosexual love in East Asia, as well as the role of rope as an organic bond between the female body and flowers. Hakone, Japan, the place where we first met, was the main shooting location for this project. I wanted to recreate that unfiltered, powerful emotional experience in my art.
"Semenawa" refers to the pleasure derived from the rope's suffering in Shibari, resonating with my experience of unrequited love. I was able to find relief in constraint because of this blending of pleasure and agony. I feel secure in my confined state when the rope touches me and begins to wrap and tie me. Flowers, silk stockings, and breasts are symbolic of femininity in my photography; they are delicate and quiet, and represent the silent emotions I felt when falling into a same-sex love. The disorganised ropes and facelessness also allude the societal stereotypes of women in East Asian culture and the invisible prejudices of homosexuality.
I combined ephemeral flowers with enduring silk stockings and ropes to create a sculptural art piece as an expanded experiment. This sculpture is temporally oriented; the flowers fade with the passage of time, while the stockings and ropes cling to it. I chose photography to document this, freezing the moments when I am capturing. With each passing second, the posture of the flowers subtly changes, reflecting my thinking on the interplay between time and emotions.
In my exhibition, I invite audiences to first see a seemingly chaotic scene, upon closer watching, reveals complex emotions with a hint of romance. Orchids and silk stockings frame the photographs, embodying the female body within them, and withered flowers require audiences to look closely to truly perceive their presence. The concept of this exhibition not only mirrors the emotional state between her and me but also reflects my way of expressing love – delicate, implicit, yet powerful.
EXHIBITION:
Copeland Gallery, London, United Kingdom 2024