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.
© 2025 Yuelin.

See My Absence

See My Absence is a time-based kinetic sculpture that explores the transience of existence using the transformation of material as a metaphor for time, memory, and disappearance. As ice melts and metal decomposes, the piece invites quiet reflection, evoking emotional resonance as viewers witness the inevitable process of dissolution.


Recycled metal, ice, Arduino parts, bathroom caulk
6'1" × 1'7½" × 1'7½"

As the motor orchestrates the ice face’s lateral motion, its movement oscillates between search and hesitation—an automated gesture that unsettles the boundary between mechanism and sentience. The face turns,  aligning with the viewer’s gaze, a brief convergence that dissolves as the ice succumbs to its inevitable phase transition. Ice, a material that exists in flux, underscores the instability of form, its dissolution indexing time’s progression and the fragility of presence. As the structure degrades, the once-defined features blur, melting into formlessness. Droplets descend onto the heated base, their contact triggering an ephemeral vaporization—an audible record of erasure. This interplay between liquefaction and oxidation, between disappearance and residue, positions this work within an ecology of material and temporal collapse. The work does not simply depict loss but enacts it, situating the viewer within the mechanics of impermanence itself.