Salmon / Underwear / Bath / Orange Juice, from I Hope You Like What You Have Seen series, 2020
Salmon / Underwear / Bath / Orange Juice, from I Hope You Like What You Have Seen series, 2020
I Hope You Like What You Have Seen
In this project, I am trying to curate a series of videos of different male strangers performing different mundane activities for me via Skype. These men are the ones who contacted me by emails or online messages, saying that they want to be shown in my work. Their desire to be looked at opens up the complicated relationship between the voyeur and the exhibitionist. During these chats, I try to instruct these men’s behaviour through my text or voice messages without showing myself in person or via the webcam. My attempt to be in full control of them is demonstrated not only through directing what they do and how they do it, but also by executing the power inherent in their total visibility and my invisibility. By creating these visual pleasures for possibly both sides of the screen, I try to explore how the power dynamic inherent in the gaze has changed in the Internet age.
Paintings, Dreams and Love
In this series of photographs, I project my fantasies onto the male figure to continue my investigation of male representations as an erotic subject. By looking at certain classical paintings in art history, I try to reflect on these representations of the female body and make my own portrayal of the body of desire. My desire, dreams and love for the desired body are illustrated in a photographic form, using animals and fantastic settings. In these photographs, the female figure is no longer the incarnation of someone else’s dream or desire, but the creator of her own stories.
The Veil, diptych, 2019
The Nightmare, 2019
The Death of Actaeon, 2020
Yushi Li is a Chinese artist based in London, working primarily in photography. She received her MA in Photography recently and is doing her PhD in Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Li was selected as one of the artists for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2018 and nominated as one of the 100 RPS Hundred Heroines in 2019. Her work mainly engages with the question of the gaze in relation to gender, desire and sexuality, culminating in the investigation of the male representation as an erotic subject in light of digital social networks.