Shuang Li’s Explorations of Intimacy and Absence
The Chinese-born, Swiss-based artist on My Chemical Romance, transcendence through fandom and the meaninglessness of words at MANIFESTO 2024.
Born in 1990 in rural southeastern China, Shuang Li explores the intimacy and absence that comes with forming an online identity in the 21st century. Her works concern themselves with fandom and community, refracted through various modes of digital communication.
Recently, Li reflected on her connection to the band My Chemical Romance, whose music she discovered through bootleg CDs while growing up in Wuyishan City. This sense of physical and cultural disconnect, being far removed from the band's origins in New Jersey, is a recurring theme in her work. In the video piece Déjà Vu, Li explores the difficulties of language-processing and the void created by silence. During the pandemic, she initiated the performance work Lord of the Flies in Shanghai while stranded in Europe, with actors portraying her and reading letters to her friends at the opening.
Presence and absence are constantly lurking in Li’s work, even down to the conceit of fandom itself, forever manifesting as a false sense of closeness to an idol, defined by an unending, unfulfilled fantasy of being near them. We caught up with Li shortly after the opening of her latest group exhibition at Karma International in Zurich. Below, she reflects on everything from her formative years in China to the power of emo pop-punk.
You just opened an exhibition, right?
I just opened a show at Karma in Zurich during Art Weekend, the weekend before Art Basel, so it’s a bit intense. Now I'm waiting for the train to go back home to Geneva. I’m going to lie down on the beach next week.
You’ve had a busy start to the year with exhibitions in Milan, a show in Zurich and a show in New York. How are you finding the business?
It is busy, for sure. I'm trying to get used to it. I used to be able to lock myself up and work on a show for a whole year. I could spend months at home working, not going anywhere or seeing anything. I can’t do that anymore. But then, this year, I’ve met so many artists I look up to and even became friends with some of them, like Sophia Al Maria and Ryan Trecartin, and I’ve been able to see how they do things. I'm inspired by how they can have 10 shows on at once.
How did you get into making art? What were your first inspirations and motives?
I didn't go to art school, but I always liked making little things. I didn't really consider them art—they were just little projects.
Everyone you know is flattened into pixels. I’m trying to feel my way around the omnipresence of technology.
Shuang Li
Can you give us an example?
Looking back, they were kind of installations—things I could do in my room. I had a closet, and I would attach a sticker to the door; every time I opened it, it would break the sticker, and I’d have to make a new one. And I always liked writing. That’s where most of my work starts, especially if I’m working on videos. I write and do research and the visuals come later.
I went to grad school in New York to do media studies and realized I wasn’t cut out for academia. I hated it. When I graduated, I was a bit lost and confused, but then I saw an installation by Sophia Al Maria called Black Friday at the Whitney. That’s the moment I realized it was something I wanted to do.
The interplay between text and image feels central to your work.
I like to play around with these different elements. I don’t care about filming, to be honest. I just film on my iPhone or work with a director of photography. Editing is what I like. I like putting everything together. That's where the magic happens for me. Editing is like writing, in some way.
Film and writing typically involve a lot of editing—or, at least, both come to life through this process.
Writing is also a really good tool for processing things. I’m so addicted to TikTok—I can be scrolling forever, and it feels like the world is spinning. Writing helps bring me back to sanity.
Tell me about the work you’re presenting at MANIFESTO.
I’m showing this work called Déjà Vu, and it's about how language is falling apart. The video was originally commissioned by the Canton of Geneva to be shown in the train station. I cut it all up into two-minute-long chapters so people can watch it while waiting for a train. But you can’t have any sound in the train station, which was the first prerequisite for the commission, and it was difficult because sound is such an important part of my videos. Silence, or this void of sound, became the work’s central theme.
It’s about a completely silent town and its history. It starts with people forgetting words, mixing up the words for “apple” and “pear”—small mistakes that lead to bigger mistakes—and then, one day, they can’t speak anymore. It’s kind of about how words don’t mean anything anymore.
Your work, especially concerning technology, is about both absence and transcendence.
My show about My Chemical Romance—I was such a big fan of that band—the work talks about discovering My Chemical Romance as a teenager in China, not speaking English, but not needing to speak English in order to understand their music.
In terms of fandom in general, it's fascinating for me. How do you literally transcend? Fandom, in a way, is the absence of the idol.
For an exhibition of shows in Shanghai at Antenna Space, which you couldn’t attend, you sent people dressed as you. You’re transcending yourself, but it’s also about absence and yearning and being separate.
My work is inspired or about technology to start with, but I realized it's ultimately against it in some way—not completely, but in some way. It’s against how claustrophobic the algorithm is. Everyone you know is flattened into pixels. I’m trying to feel my way around the omnipresence of technology.
Discover more stories from MANIFESTO 2024, including Ramdane Touhami, BLESS, Liv.e and Mark Leckey.