The Brooklyn Rail

Li Linlin’s recent solo exhibition conveys the dramas and beauties of life in China. Her art installations jar visitors into facing social realities and behavioral habits associated with this high-pressure period of post-pandemic productivity. With astonishing skills in stage design, the artist leads each beholder to feel realities of the present that cannot be escaped; yet, her search for beliefs leads to the envisioning of new realities that are more vivid, inclusive, and life-affirming.

The exhibition title “Codfish of Alaska” is a metaphor that personifies Li Linlin’s growth, pursuit of beliefs, and search for the bodily sight and touch of natural life. She imagines herself as a fish enjoying an abundance of precious life amid beautiful landscapes of Alaska. In keeping with this theme of revitalization, Li Linlin’s workspace as resident artist at Yan Art Gallery is open as one of the installations belonging to the exhibition. The show includes work from the last decade and new pieces completed in 2024.

Near the entrance is a reinstallation of Forgotten Realm (2017), where forgotten ways of looking poetically at life are contrasted with realities of alienation in the present. On the wall are words from Song Dynasty poet Fan Chengda (1126-1193), about light from moon and stars on the sea: “May I be like a star, such as the moon, every night streamer bright.” On the floor, a miniature environment includes a pond filled with sad, doll-like human figures awash in oblivion as a result of twenty-firstcentury pressures. Their faces are reminiscent of John Evertt Millais’ Ophelia (1851-52), a Pre-Raphaelite painting named after Shakespeare’s character who drowns herself after abuse and pressures from her surroundings. At the shoreline, a lonely figure holds a skull, as the frozen figures face the sky as if longing for feelings of naturalness in the present.

In The Wonder of Triangles (2024), two stairways rise above an abyss of dark water to two towers which lead in turn to a higher observation platform. As Li Linlin explains, the Song poem, the sad figures, and the observation platform are an ensemble: “[t]he observation platform is a reciprocal sight, and this group of works actually wants to express the hope of making everything return to reality.” From the platform of The Wonder of Triangles, a visitor looks out at walls painted orange and red to simulate warm sunset colors; this signals a capacity of one’s own bodily senses (such as the naturalness of eyes, ears, and touch) to support feelings of beauty, spiritual pleasure, and vitality. Standing on the observation platform, a person is in a place that unites spaces below marked by the contrasting neon signs “man” and “women.”

The assembly of Decameron (2015) on the second floor is a highlight of the show. The title comes from Giovanni Boccaccio’s classic work of 14^th century Italian prose, where ten story tellers share lessons about human vices, capacities, and good fortune. Li Linlin creates a surreal, twenty-first century version based on her own real-life resistance to educational practices. From the perspective of a teacher or a stranger walking by, there are thirty desks in order. From behind, one can see thirty little worlds of “oneself” where each student creates or imagines a miniature atmosphere. The illuminated, self-contained spaces inside are by turns shocking and hopeful: an astronaut with crystals, dark stairways ascending into clear light, growing mushrooms, rows of teeth, an umbilical cord, flies on a healthy brain, tasty desserts with colorful icing, artificial grass with eyes, tiny rescue workers in a sea of worms, and a soldier looking at his own head in a showcase. The result is a morality tale for the survival of creativity. Individuals have interiors inaccessible to others; yet, all are alongside each other and inseparable.

The enclosed case of Garden of Eden (2015) presents an imaginary model of relationships between nature and humanity. In Li Linlin’s twenty-first century Eden, there is crisis, change, and beauty. Although the changes can be disorienting, the idea here is connection with natural processes. Sites of decay display harmonizing colors as one living being transforms into others. What appear at first to be vines becomes the body of an animal. New foliage grows from an overturned doll resembling a small human child. So from looking at Garden of Eden, a beholder may think of interrelatedness: each species is an embodiment or reincarnation of those that came before it. But at the same time, this scene is unsettling, when this interrelatedness is imagined instead as a theatre of consumption.

Keeping heart in the age of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT is a topic in AI Green Channel (2024). Li Linlin uses ChatGPT to print out a wide range of images illustrating both mechanical and naturally given human hearts. She places these heart-patterns in a corridor decorated in green. Some images are of artificial hearts that money can buy; others lead to an imagining of artificial replacements even for the human brain. This corridor symbolizes the growth of AI, which is now fast-tracked socially and economically through what is called a VIP “green channel.” But there is a second side to AI here: The largest of the ChatGPT heart-patterns looks much like the skull held by the lonely figure in Forgotten Realm. Ultimately, the pleasant green walls become disturbing; AI Green Channel is also a metaphor for the social management of human anxieties as uses of AI spread.

Feelings of ambivalence also emerge from Things of Order (2024), where a living space enclosed by metal bars symbolizes protection and also a cage-like prison. Furnished with comfortable chairs, the installation includes a map of China on the ground; a world map spread out on a heavy desk nearby. In one respect, the installation represents pandemic years where global travel and exchange halted for purposes of protection. Yet, the cage is also a metaphor for human interiority and its different modes: rationality that brings order, desire (suggested by a video-loop of a dog licking the camera), and plaster casts of ear, nose, and eye. As Li Linlin notes, confinement is at times self-imposed. This paradoxical combination of protection and containment is also expressed by another work in the show; a wealth of living fish swim in a commercial fishtank.

Hope and belief are expressed in the front yard of Yan Art Gallery. Outdoors, with Return to the World (2021), there is a scattering of diamond-shapes in pink, yellow and blue inscribed with “I believe” and illuminated by neon from within. According to Li Linlin, the diamonds are about the search for personal beliefs, good-imagination, the ability to achieve good things, and symbolization of hope and energy. The inner light of the diamonds is intended as a simulation of the sunset glow on the walls in The Wonder of Triangles.

For Li Linlin, globalization is not about imposing some universal understanding. It exists as relations of communication between different people at local levels. It is as if all of us are fish searching for a vitality of self-sensing as a way of avoiding the forgetfulness and oblivion that arise from the new technologies and modernizations.