Craig Jun Li
...tell me what you want, what you really, really want
November 5–December 20, 2022
Opening: November 5, 2022, 5–7pm
Home Gallery
291 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002
Craig Jun Li, …tell me what you want, what you really, really want, 2022, T-slot aluminum extrusions, clear acrylic panels, MDF panels, rayon flocking, silicone, recycled chili oil, collected cigarette ashes, recycled food residues, collected trash (from Grand street), blower fan unit, timer box power outlet, 3d-printed polylactide, plastic chain links, motorized minute/hour/day clock system, LED light unit, surveillance camera casings, video monitors. Photos by Stefany Lazar.
ACOMPI is thrilled to present ...tell me what you want, what you really, really want (November 5–December 20, 2022), the first solo exhibition in New York City by artist Craig Jun Li.
The cavernous installation takes cues from both its immediate surroundings—a neighborhood in Chinatown where construction and scaffolding spill from interiors into the street—and the ancient Chinese grottoes that Li visited while growing up: mountainsides with empty carved niches that originally housed Buddhist sculptures. After researching the history of Chinese grottoes—marked by destruction and pillaging—and the circulation of stolen sculptural objects once attached to their niches, Li examines “excavation" in considering the history of Chinese immigrants and migrants in the United States. ...tell me what you want, what you really, really want draws on HOME Gallery’s architectural frontality and its resonance with “face" value.
In the window-front gallery, Li presents a facade decorated and punctured with various elements: a wind chamber containing street trash collected around the block; a two-channel video installation with digital monitors housed in repurposed security cameras; three chain-linked clocks using jade rollers as hands; and dents, some flocked and stained with food residue, others inlaid with silicone panels that contain recycled chili oil. These materials, many directly sourced from Manhattan’s Chinatown, propose alternative ways of seeing through the constant performance of slicing, reappropriating, and discarding cultural heritage and artifacts. Considering the process of extraction as inherently subtractive or negative, Li uses photographic methodologies to create new embodiments that function as “positives.” These simple machines reflect back the allure of the everyday while transforming shards, trash, and excess into mechanisms of reorientation.
The videos on display present pirated clips from the acclaimed Wong Kar-wai film In the Mood for Love (2000). Li examines how Hong Kong — an ever-shifting, highly politicized place, and a former British colony — is portrayed in Western popular media. Appropriating methods commonly used to evade copyright issues online, Li recorded the original film in mirror reflection and slowed down its playback speed. Literally shown in the fashion of East-West reversal, the two clips contain moments in the film when the protagonists are chatting while eating. Tied to Li’s long-time fascination with the mouth as a threshold that both generates language and consumes sustenance, the monitor works evoke questions of feelings and experiences that are registered onto bodies but fail to materialize in words: how does anyone articulate themself in a language where they don’t belong?
The jade roller clocks fail to either tell time or to provide lymphatic relief. By separating the concentric circles representing seconds, minutes, and hours—and giving each cycle its own path—Li highlights the construction of linear time to evoke the speculative nature of engaging with history. A popular beauty tool, jade rollers are often marketed as vaguely engaging with conflated understandings of various East Asian cultures and rituals. By giving a new practical (if illegible) role of time-telling to these highly performative tools originally intended for human bodies, Li uses absurdity and humor to challenge static semiotic associations often present in Asian American representation.
Despite the highly theatrical presentation of their work, Li identifies as a “recovering minimalist.” They transform refuse, surveillance cameras, leftover food, and jade rollers not through reinvention but through recontextualization to extract hidden and suppressed potential from highly legible materials. “I often think about how Felix Gonzalez-Torres once said he thinks of his art as minimalism in drag,” Li says. Less interested in offering resolutions, the artist has built a structure for contemplation and reflection. Collectively, the different apparatuses embedded within Li’s facade point towards the performative nature of diasporic identities intertwined with material embodiments that are highly commercialized and plastic. Titled “...tell me what you want, what you really, really want” — borrowing from the popular 1996 Spice Girls song Wannabe, which was released one year before Hong Kong’s formal passing of authority from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China — the installation provokes collective desire for alternative futures deeply rooted in understanding the history of placeness that has been governed and othered.
THE ARTIST WOULD LIKE TO SHARE THE FOLLOWING TEXT TO ACCOMPANY THE EXHIBITION:
…cut me open, more than tears, more than rain, totally. Then, blow a kiss into my ears. I want to hear it so bad. Try to be really loud and gentle at the same time, would you? Every cut is a kiss, and every break-up is an opening. The sound a fire makes on top of a pile of wood is gorgeous like low frequency. The beauty of fire resists being captured in its coherence. There’s no two exact photographs of a flame taken at different moments. I’ve been thinking about the reflective surface of the river on our way back to the city. It fails to mirror the sky, but still shines so vigorously that a couple seconds of eye contact blinded me. For a moment I couldn’t see you anymore. Like everything else, you disappeared into the brightness, but I knew you were here. I could still feel your warmth next to me. I wondered if at that moment you shined as bright as the river. They almost made me believe that my stories about the beach weren’t real. One day as I was looking for my grandmother’s perfume bottles she mailed me years ago, I found those shards that cut me on the beach. They looked funny to me, like pieces of a puzzle that had been misplaced. Their edges don’t even look sharp enough to cut anything. Maybe they never actually cut into my flesh. Maybe I just felt pain more strongly back then. When I left, he wrote me a letter. It was the first time he ever handed me something in an envelope. I remember being always confused by the sizing of envelopes, because it seemed like no standardized paper could ever fit into any envelope without being awkwardly folded a couple of times. It was in those awkward folds that he confessed to me that all the secrets he told me were lies. He’s a writer because he needs to pour everything out. He’s cruel when he knows exactly how to hurt me. He cuts with his words, colder than any metal, sharper than any knife. I’ve learned with him that I need to mold myself into rubber, so that I would be able to endure the hits but never severe. Despite my will to fragment my spirit into as many pieces as possible, I am never brave enough to totally abandon being a whole. She gets upset when it rains, so she goes dancing on the concrete floors hidden on the other side of the jungle. She forgot to turn off the lights, and when she returned at dawn the room looked like a sea of fire. She smelled the light more thans she could smell her sweat. She only feels alive when she’s working, and she feels dead when she gets home. She notices everything that is out of place on the shelves inside of the living room cupboards. Her DVDs and cassette tapes are color coordinated, and her scissors would never be on the same shelf as her medicine bottles. She always knows when something has happened in this room. She wants to learn how to get rid of her dreadful alertness. Whenever someone tries to match her quirky, it never ends well. She hides behind her camera. What her words fail to conceal, her body emits. The distance between the man I love and me is the difference between an inch and a centimeter. Everytime I kiss him I miss the mark exactly that much, at least I think so. He would have been proud of me now. I became a liar in love with a thief. When I met him I was learning how to steal, and he lied to me that he would teach me everything he knew. I ended up only learning his language, and I don’t remember where I abandoned his craft. Sometimes I wonder how I’ve become so good at lying about things that don’t even really matter. It seems like I’m enjoying abusing this language a bit too much. Maybe being too comfortable means losing a part of you that never wanted the comfort to begin with. When she closes her eyes, all she can think about is what remains on the other side of the sun. In those moments, she suspects that shadows are the truest form of darkness. As he undressed, after finally turning off the lights, his torso turned into a negative holding the photograph of my mind. I saw lights flickering on his skin, briefly cutting off a continuous landscape. I went up to kiss all the way from the back of his right ear down to his right ankle. He stayed so quiet that I only remember hearing the wind blowing the blinds. They hit the window like I begged for his sound. I woke up to this sentence in my mind: your second mother is the better language, and the third language is your first lover.
ABOUT
CRAIG JUN LI
Craig Jun Li (b. 1998, China) lives and works in New York. Li’s practice centers image and object circulation as the axis of perversion, utilizing residues of various alternative histories to investigate their contemporary resonance. These inquiries often take the form of ever-shifting installations composed of delicate and perishable materials. Li is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College. @helmet_lung
ABOUT HOME GALLERY
Home Gallery is a large window space located at 291 Grand Street in Manhattan. It was created to make art and the conversations around it as accessible as possible. @homegallerynyc
SUBSEQUENT PROJECT:
Live Stream: Surfacing Buried Channels
May 26, 6pm
Canal Projects
361 Canal St. New York, NY, 10013
Swamp cocktail hour, 6 pm
Ribbon-cutting ceremony and reading, 7 pm
Taking cues from the Canal Street catacombs – local lore that describes a network of underground tunnels beneath Canal Street – Canal Street Research Association inaugurates a new longer-term underground archive, devoted to surfacing buried channels.
This new zone is part storage and part sculpture, designed in collaboration with architectural collective common room and conceived in collaboration with poet-painter Basie Allen and artist Craig Jun Li working with curatorial duo ACOMPI. Rainwater and leaks collected on-site form an inconspicuous circulation system flowing through shifting archival materials collected by the fictional office of Canal Street Research Association.
These underground flows are further circulated by Live Stream, a new virtual channel that will stream occasional happenings in the Canal Street Research Association basement archive. These may include interviews with neighbors and vendors, poetry and performance, as well as surfaced waters.
To celebrate the opening of the new archival sculpture, the night will begin with swamp cocktails followed by a ribbon-cutting ceremony with a collaged reading of watery texts by Canal Street Research Association and Basie Allen. This project brings into play a nexus of relationships that skirt the edges of official and unofficial, formal and informal, real and fake, above and below.
