LI Yuchen
Born 1991, Nanchang, China
Currently lives and works between Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Petemoro, Mexico.
ARTITST STATEMENT
LI Yuchen's practice traces a journey through migration, identity, and decolonial healing, asking what it means to belong beyond the man-made divides of skin and passports. LI searches for forms of diasporic belonging rooted instead in the land we are inhabiting, reweaving relations with the more-than-human worlds, the stories, the mystery and magic.
Raised within the system of modernity, LI uses art to step outside its singular story of "progress", a trajectory that carries destruction, oblivion, and alienation in its wake. She approaches her artworks as sites of encounter and land-based learning, where we enter the lives of others across difference through personal narratives, lived experiences, and embodied knowledges: gestures toward plural worlds and renewed kinship with Earth.
Working interdisciplinarily across video, installation, performance, and collaborative processes, she weaves constellations of stories to re-member hidden narratives and displaced ways of living: food ingredients staged as protagonists of their own migratory journeys; an essay film in Tanzania that unsettles China's image as neocolonial power or decolonial ally by weaving migrant voices across eras; workshops with migrant students testifying to life in the in-between; rerooting practices linking Dutch sacred sites with learning with the Iku community in Colombia. Across food, image, and matter, one gesture recurs: loosening singular stories to let plural, entangled ones speak.
Her current project stages a counter-modernity ritual: a scenographic installation of copper reclaimed from electronic waste, where copper and stones speak back from the depths of the mountains, inviting radical rest and territorial attunement.
LI is a member of the Weaving Realities collective, where she engages in performances and workshops that deepen our connection to the living Earth, a member of Pluriversity Weavers to learn and unlearn with the Iku community and the co-founder of Asian Movie Night, a roaming film project that celebrates fluid Asian identities through cinema and dialogue. Through these collaborative endeavors, LI continues to explore art as a practice of decolonial world-making, reenchantment, and the restoration of relational worlds.
LI has collaborated with various art and academic institutions in the Netherlands and abroad, such as Rijksakademie, CBK Zuidoost, Nieuw Dakota, Goleb, NieuwLand in Amsterdam, Casco institute for Art, Utrecht University in Utrecht, International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, OtherWise from Wageningen University, The Decolonial Summer School organised by University College Roosevelt in Middelburg, Bonn University, Kassel University in Germany, Editorial Collectivo Retos in Mexico and UniTierra Manizales in Colombia.
