Text / Ching-Hui Chou (Curator)
“Loneliness is a heavy burden.” – Federico Fellini
It is because when you are alone, you can only dig into yourself.
“When alone, you usually realize that you cannot bear to dig into yourself. ”
The point is whether you have the courage to be alone with yourself, or whether you are in the state of being with and digging into yourself.
The entire exhibition is an action to bare the roots, to expose and to examine the raw, mysterious and even ambiguous things; and because of the bareness, the roots seem fragile, desolate but powerful at the same time.
Yu-Chi Li’s work aims to evoke an ancient, instinctual perception, shattering disciplinary or constructed habits to induce re-perception of the world and the self. Introspective as well as extrospective – perhaps, the two opposing forces are basically two sides of one action – the action unveils a function, an inquiry and a child-like instinct to ask, “Why?”
Therefore, what seems reasonable is in fact unconcluded; what seems self-evident is also the most ambiguous.
The unconcluded bears weight.
The seemingly weightless feathers are capable of taking things that are thousand times heavier off the ground.
The unconcluded is a combination of animality and humanity.
It is worthwhile to explore the crevice between these two opposing qualities.
Li’s work has always seemed to be tracing the origin and unearths the unrecognizable aspects in life through perception and observation, triggering further thinking and questioning on this basis.
This endless repeating process is perhaps the resistance we as human beings cannot avoid.