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.

The Absurdity of Softness

The Absurdity of Softness operates within the tension between materiality and cultural semiotics, fusing the everyday with the hyperreal. The work appropriates and reconfigures symbols from popular culture, collapsing Sarah Lucas’s interrogation of gendered forms with Jeff Koons’s critique of consumerist spectacle. Through an interplay of surface and substance—softness rendered rigid, the mass-produced made singular—the sculpture articulates the contradictions inherent in objectification and desire. Absurdity emerges not as an anomaly but as a structural condition, embedded in the very processes that govern cultural production and consumption.

08/15/2024
Stockings, cotton, sewing thread
Variable Dimensions

Stockings, as a material closely associated with the body and gender, are recontextualized into a soft yet distorted shape, simultaneously conveying the fragility of the body and a sense of irony. The softness of the cotton paired with the elasticity of the stockings transforms the familiar symbol of the “balloon dog” into something that loses the stability and strength typically associated with Koons’s works. Instead, it presents an absurd, almost unstable state.

© 2025 Yuelin.