Joy Li was born in 1999 in Gansu, China. She received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture with a minor in Theater from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021 and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2026. Her practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Through her work, Li reinterprets the relationship between objects and the body, amplifying the allure and danger embedded in everyday materials. Her practice reveals how the material world manifests human desire, inviting viewers to re-experience and interact with familiar things in unfamiliar ways.
Li is the recipient of the Schickle-Collingwood Prize from Yale School of Art and the 2024–2025 Porsche Young Chinese Artist of the Year Award. Her recent solo exhibitions and projects include: “Gas Station X,” 2024, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai; “Icarus’ Wings,” 2024, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou; “Green Water,” 2023, LINSEED, Shanghai; “Salomé,” 2022, 33ml OFFSPACE, Shanghai. Her selected group exhibitions include: “Ballet with the Devil,” PODIUM, Hong Kong; “Birth of Poetry, ”THE SHOPHOUSE, Hong Kong; “Dark Matter Ecology,” Shanghai Art Bund Center, Shanghai; “Four Winds: A Different Perspective on Southern Art,” 2024, Guangdong Contemporary Art Center, Guangzhou; “Embodied Rituals,” 2024, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou.
Thank you for speaking with us. Could you introduce your practice and what initially led you to work across sculpture, performance, and video?
My work across sculpture, installation, performance, and video works through materials with paradoxical qualities to depict moments where beauty and danger coexist in our highly commercialized world. In my sculptural works, each material holds its own duality: light that illuminates yet lures like a bug trap; silver blades that gleam with both allure and threat; and foam that occupies volume while holding almost no weight. By using the domestic and the micro as miniatures of the macro, such as dish racks resembling skyscrapers, I reveal how intimate, lived experiences become sites where broader structures of desire and power take form. I invite viewers to re-experience familiar things in unfamiliar ways.
In my performances, I use my own body to create characters that exist in relation to social structures. At times, I wear my sculptural creations, reshaping my identity and transforming into a nonhuman creature that temporarily escapes socially defined roles. At other moments, the character does the opposite, fully embodying these structures of desire by becoming someone who serves, maintains, or guides them. Inspired by flight attendants and other service-industry workers, the character offers labor that sustains systems of alienation.
Your work often explores the tensions between objects, bodies, and emotions. What draws you to investigating these relationships through art?
“TIME IS MONEY, EFFICIENCY IS LIFE.” This is the slogan of Shenzhen, China, the city I grew up in—a place driven by speed, competitiveness, and relentless development. Shenzhen is vibrant and wealthy, full of opportunity and dreams, yet burdened with fatigue, emptiness, and the commodification of people. Like the city’s frequent typhoons, life here is marked by extremes. The rain blends two opposites into a quivering experience—both refreshing and disgusting, where life-giving moisture intertwines with destructive brutality. This duality haunts my interdisciplinary practice.
Everyday objects appear frequently in your work, sometimes revealing both attraction and danger. What interests you about transforming familiar things into unfamiliar experiences?
I think the use of everyday objects can evoke a kind of collective memory, a shared living experience that builds a quick connection between the audience and my work, such as the disembodied hair on the bathroom wall, eggs, and forks. But I present them in an unfamiliar, or in other words, unusual way. At the core, I want to suggest a different way of looking and feeling. I hope that after seeing my work, the audience can go back and see their everyday life in a new way. That is my ambition.
Once a friend told me that after watching my video work about fire, every time she saw fire, she thought of my work.
Your practice moves between sculpture, theater, music, and performance. What possibilities open up when these different forms intersect in a single project?
Working with different media, not necessarily using all of them in a single project, gives me opportunities to experience the different characteristics of each medium. This is a bit hard to describe, but for example, the pace of each medium feels very different. Sculpture and installation are very slow processes, and I can come back to them after a long pause. Performance is very present—I always need to make a sequence of decisions in a short amount of time. Working with different media feels like dancing to music with different BPMs. It has been so much fun.
What forms of connection shape your sense of community, and where do you place yourself within those relationships?
Because I’ve been working in different cities and countries, the people around me have kept changing. Physically, my community is fluid, but spiritually we stay connected through our shared interest in art. I know social media has many negative influences, but sometimes I’m grateful that we can keep up with each other’s practices through it. Sometimes I see a friend post a new work, and I can tell what they’ve been thinking just by looking at it.
I don’t know where I place myself within those relationships, because I don’t even know where or how to place myself in this world. But maybe it is exactly this sense of not quite belonging that allows me to look at everything around me with curiosity and fear, doubt and affection at the same time.
Do you have any advice that you would offer to others?
Although the materials and media may vary, I think the core of an artistic practice is always about how you see the world and how you understand your own existence within it. I often think about a saying from Chinese martial arts: 外练筋骨皮，内练一口气 （you train the body on the outside, but cultivate your inner spirit on the inside）.
text & photo courtesy of Joy Li
- Website: https://joyli.art
- Instagram: @joy_li__
