YUELIN LI
INFO
I paint what is closest to my heart, beginning with small, intimate moments of everyday life: freshly painted nails, the act of trimming body hair, or a pear cut in half. Working primarily in oil, I depict bodies and objects in domestic spaces, finding tenderness, longing, and sadness in what might otherwise seem ordinary.Through close framing and attention to skin, fabric, and small gestures, I give these details room to be felt. The desire to be close to another person runs through my work. My paintings are often quiet, but the feelings within them are not always peaceful. I paint what is closest to my heart, beginning with small, intimate moments of everyday life: freshly painted nails, the act of trimming body hair, or a pear cut in half. Working primarily in oil, I depict bodies and objects in domestic spaces, finding tenderness, longing, and sadness in what might otherwise seem ordinary.Through close framing and attention to skin, fabric, and small gestures, I give these details room to be felt. The desire to be close to another person runs through my work. My paintings are often quiet, but the feelings within them are not always peaceful. I paint what is closest to my heart, beginning with small, intimate moments of everyday life: freshly painted nails, the act of trimming body hair, or a pear cut in half. Working primarily in oil, I depict bodies and objects in domestic spaces, finding tenderness, longing, and sadness in what might otherwise seem ordinary.Through close framing and attention to skin, fabric, and small gestures, I give these details room to be felt. The desire to be close to another person runs through my work. My paintings are often quiet, but the feelings within them are not always peaceful. I paint what is closest to my heart, beginning with small, intimate moments of everyday life: freshly painted nails, the act of trimming body hair, or a pear cut in half. Working primarily in oil, I depict bodies and objects in domestic spaces, finding tenderness, longing, and sadness in what might otherwise seem ordinary.Through close framing and attention to skin, fabric, and small gestures, I give these details room to be felt. The desire to be close to another person runs through my work. My paintings are often quiet, but the feelings within them are not always peaceful.

The Absurdity of Softness

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

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.

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.