Junyi Li

What do people really try to preserve from the old stuff? Is it just the look these things were before?

Many reproduced vintage and replica spaces may look almost the same as before, but they lose the unique emotions and memories of the old things they used to house. Junyi’s work developed from an old family storage box. The clothes inside have been abandoned in a sense, but are still stored in a corner of the house, just like some fading memory. Through analyzing and deconstructing garments, recording the traces of them, traces of time, traces of preservation, traces of construction, traces of use and traces of original shapes.  Those traces together make the old stuff become pieces in memory. Reconstructing the garments in new and old fabrics with all these traces, Junyi explores new ways to preserve the meaning of old things.