李奕明 (Lǐ Yì Míng)Born in the U.S.A., raised in China
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As an interdisciplinary artist and thinker, Yiming Clara is interested in how forms of language—utterance, noise, color, gait, space—construct the fabric of our reality. Thereby, with a conceptual turn towards construction materials and found objects, she uses sculpture and photography to bring questions into material form, interrogating how ideas, meanings, structures, and ways of being are built, and how their assumed solidity and permanence can be unsettled. Her practice is committed to an intuition, a mode of making bound to the impetus inherent in material which allows subterranean theoretical workings, philosophical underpinnings, and affective states to emerge through direct translation into a material form. Her cross-continental upbringing propels a continual search for grounding in ways beyond place and language, and prompts a continual renegotiation of meaning—linguistic, moral, and emotional—leaving her to scrutinize the only language that seems untethered, the sensory world.
Her work has been shown at Climate Control Gallery in the Mission District and FOG art fair. She has worked as a studio assistant for Laurent Grasso (Paris), Roxy Paine (Montana), a research assistant for Darcy G. Grigsby (UC Berkeley), and Winnie Wong (UC Berkeley).
Aside from Chinese and English, I work through abstraction, a language I find to be an act of performance that enduringly performs. Never static, abstraction propels an object into an ongoing state of motion—deconstructing recognition and reconstructing meaning—upon all who engage. It takes the operations of language into a spatial dimension, differing in its confluence of an incontestable physicality yet contestable consensus.
On objects and questions