By
Aoife Donnellan
PhD Anthropology
Visual artist and anthropologist Cherie Li’s practice is concerned with capturing the minutiae of sociality, intimacy, and joy. Her work grounds ephemeral experiences in material expression, stitching transient moments in time into the layers of her objects, installations and performances. We discussed the role of object-based facilitation, mediation, documentation and audience in her work, exploring themes of place, diaspora, and method. Below is a selection of images of Cherie’s practice that highlight the delicate materiality, non-linear narration, and domestic concerns at play in her work.
Aoife Donnellan: How does your visual art practice relate to your anthropological training?
Cherie Li: Anthropological training plays a part in my current work as a facilitator delivering creative learning through play activities in a museum catering to the neighbouring borough and local community. As in fieldwork, being in the community, learning about and building relationships with people is essential to delivering meaningful activity that responds to people’s needs. Informal participant observation – observing and documenting how audiences navigate museum spaces and respond to activities, and listening to people’s comments and conversations – informs the content of the activities we develop and how I facilitate. I see my creative facilitation work as an extension of my visual art practice. It is about inviting people into an experience and creating an environment for play, collaboration, and connection. Uniquely, facilitation in this museum setting takes an object-centred approach, always linking to the collection.
Previously, I had a sense that this was what I wanted to do in my independent visual art practice. My interest was always in social relationships and everyday societal practices. My work attends to details of the every day, moments of connection, entanglements between people with each other and objects and places. My process involves collecting textured documentation of these lived experiences to make sense of them. I was drawn to relational aesthetics, works that are participatory and collaborative, and artists who use everyday objects, actions, and social interaction as material. All of this led me to anthropology, a field that would allow me to study in an in-depth and more formalised way what my art practice was already concerned with.
AD: Your practice often features auto-ethnographic techniques, examining experiences of family through a diasporic lens. Could you elaborate on this in relation to the materials you choose to work with?
CL: What comes to mind first are the food materials that feature in my works about family. Many of my works have come out of the experience of being geographically distant from relations that matter to me. They are my attempts to ask how distant people and places can be made materially present, or conversely how I can leave material traces of my presence behind, as with my work 10 secret things (2018). In ‘in the burned house I am eating breakfast’ (2018) and ‘this is just to say, so sweet’ (2019), I sought materials that have a nostalgic quality and are attached to sensory memories for me, which might elicit a sense of familiarity in others as well. Reflecting my own lived experience in a family where food is a prominent language of care, I gravitated towards using food objects, practices, and spaces as material, exploring how they can mediate and embody family relations. Food is such a prominent anchor to cultural identity, a way to bring forth familiar tastes and scents, to evoke feelings of a home far away and bring it within reach. I also drew on conversations with my parents and documents from family archives, such as photos and recipes from my grandparents’ restaurant in Beijing. Other times, I’ve used materials that are rooted in specific locations, such as the fragments of peeled wall paint and traces of my footsteps in ‘walking in Hong Kong’ (2018).
AD: Your work takes many different forms including lists, paintings, films, drawings, sculpture and installation. What is the relationship between process and output in your practice? What attracts you to this variety of media?
CL: The lines between process and output in my practice are blurry. The variety of media and many different forms my works take arise out of this attempt to archive an embodied experience. My output often takes the form of documentation; a record of durational activity or fleeting occurrences. Often, works start as a lived moment or experience that I feel compelled to record and unravel to understand. For instance, ‘as long as you exist I’m happy’ (2017) started with a conversation between me and my sister that at the time felt important to note down. I kept rolling this seemingly plain conversation over and over in my head. The written text, stop-motion animation and performative act that make up the work draw out the sisterly intimacy and tangle of sentiments that I felt the conversation had so fully encapsulated.
Connecting back to your first question, training in anthropological methods has emphasised the unique texture of data and knowledge provided by varied methods – how the mode of collection dictates what is collected and conveyed. I’ve also been influenced by artists like Sophie Calle and On Kawara, and their works that exist as documentations of life and activity. For example, Sophie Calle’s photographs and diary-esque entries in ‘The Hotel’ (1981) and ‘Suite Vénitienne’ (2015), that evidence a time-based happening and On Kawara’s ‘I Got Up’ (1968-1979) postcards where he recorded and shared with others the date and time he got up each day. There is something beautiful and meaningful about documentations of life so simple as ‘I was here’, ‘I did something’, ‘I loved someone’.
AD: ‘Tiny Exhibition’ (2019), was a work you created in your home for previously unused corners, for example, window sills or bed-frames. What role does audience play in your work?
CL: As I develop my practice, I’m more intent on my work being the production of an experience for the audience rather than an art object. In ‘tiny exhibition’, small works in unused corners of the home were meant to be delightful interjections or interruptions in daily life, to give the audience the sense of stumbling across something unexpected. The inspiration for ‘tiny exhibition’ came from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s 1980s kitchen exhibition. Christian Boltanski hid a projection of a candle beneath the kitchen sink, only visible through a crack between cabinet doors. I love these acts of creating small miracles and moments of wonder in the everyday for someone to find. ‘Tiny exhibition’ was a stepping stone towards ‘this is just to say, so sweet’, a site-specific installation and subtle intervention of an existing space. In a similar way, I wanted the audience to step into a state of heightened attention and care by stepping into the space, to experience noticing small details over time and with patience, to become aware of the impact of their own presence.
