ABOUT
THE FUTURE IS NOW!
Art | Music | Sculpture | Performance | Fashion
Philip Li is a young British-born Chinese artist and performer from Huddersfield, England. His wide ranging art practice fuses together performance, sculpture, music, fashion, ceramics and styling into a live and unique-styled vision. Li presents himself as both the sculptor and sculpture, and uses his body as tool and form of expression. Recurrent themes that underpin his work include the construction and re-appropriation of the body, and its images of gender and sexual identity.
Graduating from Camberwell College of Arts with a First Class Honours, Li appropriates making process as ritual and turns the world into a social sculpture. For his recent works Li uses the traditional world of ceramics as both tool and concept, bringing innovation to its cultural status, ideas and processes. He is renowned for his futuristic and theatrical aesthetic; creating geometric ceramic body-sculptures, unique performance photographs, and also his ritualistic live-making performances, which see him writhing around in clay to the sounds of industrial noises and bleeps. Fusing alternative art platforms with contemporary forms of sculpture underpin Li’s practice, shifting the placement of performative sculpture and live art into the modern environment.
Recent works include the performance 'Germination: The Avant-Garden Body-Sculptures' with LuckyPDF at The Barbican; and commissioned body-sculptures for Dazed & Confused, Lady Gaga and English National Ballet. Li has recently completed an Artist-in-Residence position at Camberwell College of Arts, where he exhibited as part of group exhibition 'Shall/Will'. Li has also worked with Wallpaper* Magazine since 2008 on their Fashion and Interiors features and editorials. Read his Le Fil blog for a further insight into his art and life.
Photograph: Spencer Murphy, Wallpaper*