Quarantined in an urban city in Switzerland for three months, the artist witnessed the sense of emptiness reaching its ultimate level. No trace of life could be spotted outside of the window. The clouds in the sky and the boulders on the ground seemed to be the only beings left in the world. The isolation and physical confinement caused by the global pandemic nevertheless inspired Li to return to the origin of artmaking – on her sketchbook, she delineated the two remaining natural elements she could detect with only pencils. While observing the movements of the clouds in the sky became her daily pleasure, she had gradually been accustomed to the routine that traditional studio artists employed to produce art. The five series of pencil drawings showcased in the exhibition revived the process of which the artist recorded the shapes of cloud and cloud maps, investigated the traditional techniques that European artists used to paint clouds, as well as depicted the different, delicate textures of clouds in her sketchbook. It was during these observations and sketches that Li also began to contemplate the relation between cloud and stone. The ingenuous use of colors and brushstrokes on the paintings demonstrates the artist’s intention to blur the differences, including the shapes, spaces, masses, and many other physical appearances, between the two subjects in order to challenge the audience’s habitual visual perceptions of space, form and gravity. In fact, Airdrop attempts to present an unprecedent conversation between cloud and boulder. Despite the difference in physicality, they both serve as the carrier of time and eternity and can be converted into each other – they are analogues.
In the late nineteenth century, the British art critic and philosopher John Ruskin delivered a series of lectures at the London Institution, in which he used cloud that often appeared in weather broadcast as a metaphor to reflect upon the “modern anxiety” triggered by the rapid transformation from agriculture civilization to industrial civilization after the second Industrial Revolution and to criticize the loss of faith in the British society. In this exhibition, the symbol of stability and permanence in the ancient Egyptian art and architecture is printed as sand columns with human handprints on them, embodying human being’s wish to manipulate and dominate fate. Meanwhile, the artist also relocates the concept that Ruskin proposed in the contemporary digital age, utilizing the connection between “cloud” and “cloud computing” as a starting point to explore the anxiety and confusion evoked by the internet. In Nephophobia and Prevailed Sight, although the image of clouds -- the symbol of cloud computing – manage to knit individuals closer and tighter, it inevitably confines, or imprisons, modern people under the inescapable internet surveillance. Modern urban humanity is haunted by the shadow of vacuity and manipulated by the intangible, omnipresent big data, and the fact that no one can escape from this situation makes individuals increasingly anxious and dreadful. The video Clod Cloud presents an expanding, enormous landfill in the clouds that is consist of accumulated junk data. Through this piece of video art, the artist poses several questions to the audience: Why do humans pursue eternity? Will the data saved in the cloud storage last forever? In the digital society, can data fulfill human’s aspiration for immortality? If, one day, the human society disappears but data manages to remain, is this what we desire?