YUELIN LI
INFO
Yuelin Li works across kinetic sculpture, installation, and painting. Her practice investigates relationality as a generative structure, attending to the shifting intervals between presence and distance, attachment and withdrawal. Connection in her work unfolds as a temporal modulation rather than a fixed state. Contact, suspension, and separation operate as internal reorganizations within a field of relation, producing forms that remain provisional and unstable. Solitude functions as a structural ground from which proximity emerges, recalibrates, and dissipates. Through mechanical motion and suspended gestures on canvas, she stages conditions of oscillation and deferral. Materials participate as active agents within these processes, articulating their own rhythms across time. Her works inhabit transitional thresholds, where relational forms persist in states of ongoing displacement and continuous becoming. Yuelin Li works across kinetic sculpture, installation, and painting. Her practice investigates relationality as a generative structure, attending to the shifting intervals between presence and distance, attachment and withdrawal. Connection in her work unfolds as a temporal modulation rather than a fixed state. Contact, suspension, and separation operate as internal reorganizations within a field of relation, producing forms that remain provisional and unstable. Solitude functions as a structural ground from which proximity emerges, recalibrates, and dissipates. Through mechanical motion and suspended gestures on canvas, she stages conditions of oscillation and deferral. Materials participate as active agents within these processes, articulating their own rhythms across time. Her works inhabit transitional thresholds, where relational forms persist in states of ongoing displacement and continuous becoming. Yuelin Li works across kinetic sculpture, installation, and painting. Her practice investigates relationality as a generative structure, attending to the shifting intervals between presence and distance, attachment and withdrawal. Connection in her work unfolds as a temporal modulation rather than a fixed state. Contact, suspension, and separation operate as internal reorganizations within a field of relation, producing forms that remain provisional and unstable. Solitude functions as a structural ground from which proximity emerges, recalibrates, and dissipates. Through mechanical motion and suspended gestures on canvas, she stages conditions of oscillation and deferral. Materials participate as active agents within these processes, articulating their own rhythms across time. Her works inhabit transitional thresholds, where relational forms persist in states of ongoing displacement and continuous becoming.

Static Dynamic Simulation

8/23/2020
Recycled metal, custom CNC gears
1.64' x 0.98' x 1.97'

life is not a category but a dynamic process, continuously rewritten through technological and material assemblages.

Using metal to simulate human dynamics—bending parts, assembling the skeleton, using steel bars as bones, and iron wires as muscles—I felt that this cold sculpture was imbued with human emotion and life. When I stared at it long enough, it seemed as though it had begun to move with the body I had given it.

© 2025 Yuelin.