Shuang Li: I'm Not

Shuang Li is an artist who inhabits distances with curiosity. The gaps and expanses between people and things, between words and their intended recipients, are vital territories for Li, ones in which wishes, fears, truths, and projections are cast into unknowable trajectories. In an expansive body of work that links video, sculpture, performance, and writing, Li traverses various in-betweens, paying close attention to the devices we use to minimize them and the ways in which they often fail. The relationship between these physical tools and the immaterial transmissions that course through them is often unresolved and entangled, leaving the user alienated and wanting. Within a desire to be closer lies a vulnerability, one that lurks throughout the internet, where we serve ourselves up to strangers. Through newly commissioned essays, interviews and artist interventions, Li’s first monograph, I’m Not, examines how love remains an overriding sentiment across her work, which tells stories of ceaseless yearnings for connection. The things we cannot say, the places we cannot go, the people we cannot see: all of this negation intensifies human life. Li celebrates defiant pursuits. Edited with introduction by Alison Coplan, Daniel Merritt. Text by Hanlu Zhang, Jeppe Ugelvig, Olivia Kan-Sperling. Interview by Sophia Al-Maria. Publisher: Swiss Institute/Aspen Art Museum/Pacific Hardcover, 8.5 x 11 in. 208 pgs / 165 color