Skinbound: Artist Talk with Wei Li

Join artist Wei Li for an artist talk about her creative practice, and work featured in her Project Space exhibition, Skinbound.

Registration required.

Image: Installation views of Wei Li's exhibition "Skinbound," Project Space. Photo by: Blaine Campbell.

About the artist:

Wei Li is an Edmonton-based emerging Chinese Canadian visual artist, whose experience of being a new immigrant to Canada, provides her with crucial inspiration in her artistic practice. Her dual cultural background challenges her to integrate different cultural perspectives in her works and creates tensions through the contradictions inherent in forming a new hybrid cultural identity. Li graduated in 2017 with BFA in Painting (with Distinction) from the University of Alberta and has participated in several exhibitions and artistic residencies across Canada and the United States of America, including the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Artist Residency in 2021. Her first major solo exhibition “Curious Things” was featured in August of 2017 in the Art Incubator Gallery at Harcourt House Artist Run Centre in Edmonton. Li was a finalist in the 2017 RBC Canadian Painting Competition with her works showcased at the National Art Gallery in Ottawa. Recently, Wei has expanded her practice to the digital medium. She was the recipient of the prestigious Emerging Digital Artist Award in 2022, and her digital works were acquired as part of the EQ Bank’s digital art collection and were presented at the Trinity Square Video in Toronto

In the Project Space

Wei Li’s recent series of digital works, Skinbound, offers an unsettling exploration of a world where the human body and everyday objects coalesce in evocative, visceral, and emotionally provocative hybrids. To compose these images, Li utilizes hyper-realistic computer renderings to transform consumer goods into anthropomorphic fusions by seamlessly integrating the textures of human skin, hair, and blemishes with the shapes, labels, and branding of product packaging.

Li draws from her personal experiences as an artist within the Chinese diaspora as a foundational element of these works. By transposing human elements onto objects with visual language typically recognizable to North American and East Asian households, she juxtaposes the familiar and the uncanny as a personal reflection on contending with a fluid sense of identity, femininity, and motherhood. Li’s strange forms also appeal to broader experiences of the complexities, tensions, pressures, and emotional nuances inherent in the daily reality of being part of a diasporic community within a contemporary, multicultural society.

Respect and Inclusion

By registering for this Program you agree to co-create, in collaboration with Esker Staff, Artists and Volunteers, an atmosphere of mutual inclusion and respect for all persons. This includes speaking, acting and behaving in a way that is absent of violence, harassment, racism, intimidation, bullying or discrimination of any kind regardless of, and not limited to gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, culture, age and ability. This includes in online/digital forums.

Media Consent
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