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 Embody the Trees
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“I want to be a leaf,” I said on an uneventful yet unexpected night but with insomnia. I’ve been secretly in love with the woman, a mysterious rope artist for one year, one year in chaos and awaiting. The secret affection was like tangled ropes, as well as the uncontrollable growth of branches in nature. It was growing freely in the forest; yet constrained by the unexplained tie from the depth of my heart. The tie holds the woman and me; within nature itself; the tie is the poorly slender and fragile rope; and the rope is my fantasy of this unrequited love. The rope is not only a single rope to me, it’s a silent conveyance of love. Rope speaks its loving language, and I am the one who uses this language to conduit the implicit feelings.
I Embody the Trees is a moving-image-based project, which explores performance art and Shibari (Rope art) which is a development from my last series If the Rope Could Speak. The installation consists of three projections, set at right angles to each other. The middle screens shows a rope, running horizontally from left to right, making a connection between the branches of a tree on the left hand screen, and a rope attached to female figure (self portrait) on the right hand screen. While visually connected, the movements of the three elements (tree, rope, figure) are less aligned, leading to a sense of disconnection or disassociation.
The project is inspired by an experience of unrequited love, and my understanding of how expressions in East Asian culture are often indirect and cloaked in metaphor, or gestures such as gift giving.
In seeking to embody the characteristics of a leaf I create a metaphorical representation of love, developed the idea of the thoughts I experienced when I felt devastated about love. For me, the rope and trees have so much in common: they are connected, and chaotic.
RESEARCH FILM
BODY OF WORK