Joy Li
At the crossroads of sculpture, installation, performance, and video, Joy Li explores 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.
During her residency, Li continues working on Cold Intimacies, a series of sculptures that together form a large-scale installation composed of found objects, fabricated structures, and monitors displaying moving images. Each sculpture incorporates a screen differently, ranging from a single LED to larger displays.
The installation includes a wall-mounted sculpture showing a looping video of a blue sky whose visibility fades in and out with its exposed backlight; a figurative glass sculpture holding a glowing cigarette; a bench embedded with knives that references hostile architecture, containing a 12-hour video documenting a durational performance in which a clock is created through the dripping and retraction of water droplets; a miniature skyscraper built from dish racks with monitors displaying floating bubbles reflecting blinking eyes; and a glass structure extending through a Venetian blind to touch a living plant, connecting two physically separated spaces.
Through this series, Li explores the coexistence of control and intimacy, and how highly efficient systems of control become intertwined with fantasy, desire, and illusion. Together, these sculptures trace different scales of contemporary life, from the individual body to the domestic environment, and finally to public and urban space. Using the domestic and the micro as miniatures of the macro, the artist reveals how intimate, lived experiences become sites where broader structures of desire and power take shape.
Biography
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. 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.
Recent exhibitions
| 2025 | I hold it towards you, group exhibition, Yale CCAM ISOVIST Gallery, New Haven, USA Porsche “Young Chinese Artist of the Year” Winners’ Exhibition, group exhibition, Shanghai Exhibition Center, Shanghai, CN Dark Matter Ecology, group exhibition, Shanghai Art Bund Center, Shanghai, CN Ballet with the Devil, group exhibition, PODIUM, Hong Kong, HK Birth of Poetry, group exhibition, THE SHOPHOUSE, Hong Kong, HK San Dian Shui, group exhibition, Tofu Space, Copenhagen, DK |
| 2024 | Gas Station X, solo exhibition, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, CN Porsche “Young Chinese Artist of the Year” Nominees’ Exhibition, group exhibition, Shanghai Exhibition Center, Shanghai, CN Torsos in Rain: Post Hit-and-Run, group exhibition, New Uncanny Gallery, New York, USA Four Winds: A Different Perspective on Southern Art, group exhibition, Guangdong Contemporary Art Center, Guangzhou, CN Open the Door, group exhibition, Gallery Func, Shanghai, CN At the Beginning, You Find Nothing There, group exhibition, Petitree, Shenzhen, CN Embodies Rituals, group exhibition, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, CN After Human: Marks of the Beasts, group exhibition, Tomorrow Maybe, Hong Kong, HK The Nostalgic Collection, group exhibition, Tree Art Museum, Beijing, CN |
| 2023 | Green Water, solo exhibition, LINSEED, Shanghai, CN moments that home came into establishment, group exhibition, Third Street Gallery, Shanghai, CN Tie Up, group exhibition, Mugyewon, LINSEED, Seoul, KR |
| 2022 | Salomé, solo exhibition, 33ml OFFSPACE, Shanghai, CN LAB 2: Co-Working Space, group exhibition, LIU HAISU Art Museum, Shanghai, CN |
| 2021 | Art Nova 100, group exhibition, Guardian Art Center, Beijing, CN |