李奕明 (Lǐ Yì Míng)(b. 2004) Born in New York City and raised in Beijing
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Yiming Clara is currently pursuing a B.A. in Art Practice and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. As an interdisciplinary artist and thinker, she 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 installation to explore that liminal space between the signifier and the signified. Her sculptural 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 background prompts a continual renegotiation of meaning—linguistic, moral, and emotional—leaving her to scrutinize the only language that seems untethered, the sensory world.
Li’s work has been shown at Climate Control Gallery in San Francisco and FOG art fair. She has worked as a studio assistant for Roxy Paine, a research assistant for Darcy G. Grigsby, and currently assists art historian Winnie Wong.
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