Yi Li

I have made a series of three interconnected sculptural installations which create sequences that combine form and personal expression. I call them the Past, the Reality, the Ideal.

The first is the Past - "space games, regrouping". It was my first version of how to express the idea of rules and conformity, characterised by a set of brick components where the idea of the block has the potential to be restructured, a kind of malleable pre condition before state interventions create the idea of a fixed metaphorical cube. I put it in the two groups before state combination has become set as a symbolic and physical cube. This refers to an education system where I did not express the ideas I wanted to say, and that it has taken many years to finally put a full stop to these pressures. In fact, the Bricks' two outfits are exactly the same as the school uniforms I once wore.

The second is the Reality -- the "I'll try to work with you" series. In order to express the theme more intuitively and completely, I used three significant classroom motifs -- the blackboard, the desk and the chair. This group of works continue and expand my previous ideas .Three different sponges are passively extruded and deformed in three spatial structures. The people on the blackboard wrote 1460 struggles around their own bodies; The box on the table was filled with chicken blood, as the exam-oriented education system in China is known to be known as injecting students with chicken blood (chicken blood is a stimulant, but it is also ironic). In the year when I participated in the college entrance examination, the principal often organized all the students to attend a "key class". Because the classroom area was limited, there was a row of chairs on the back wall of the classroom, which was very funny and I will never forget it.

Finally, the Ideal -- the block structure of this group of sculptures, "On the top of building", continues the exploration of the story line of "space game", and forms an invisible cuboid in twists and turns, like a certain rule system that will eventually control it. But, different from the former, manifestations, the three characters are not passive. They climb up actively and finally break through the rules to sit on the building and look up into the distance. This group of sculptures is my imagination of the future education system and my wish for the future generations. With regard to the three sculptures of "I will try to work with you", I used the Performativity of materials to express this point of view... At some point in the future the iron will naturally degrade and the polyurethane will eventually return to their original shapes.You know it's resilient. This is what I wish for offsprings. It is difficult, but it will come true.