December 18, 2018 - January 9, 2019

Jessi Li was raised Jewish, by her mother and stepfather. Her biological father was Chinese. When he died, a decade ago now, she resolved to reconnect with that heritage. She went on a pilgrimage to all sorts of funerary sites in China. As Li traveled, she found herself treated as a mysterious other. People would say to her, “your skin is like ours!” But also, “you’re big.” It was the flip side of the experience she’d had growing up, when it was her Chineseness, rather than her Westernness, that was anomalous.  

The facts of biography matter for any artist, but in Li’s case they are fundamental, for her iconography is generated out of this experience of place and displacement. To make sense of it, she has gravitated to the “carrier bag” theory of fiction outlined by Ursula K. Le Guin – the project of “trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.”

And Li’s work does contain multitudes. Prior to attending Hunter, she had trained in ceramics and glass, and she retains an allegiance to the vessel form, because it implies the containment of whatever is needful. These days though, her work ranges far outside the expected vocabulary of craft genres. One of her sculptures features a store-bought toilet seat and lid, a nod to Duchamp of course, which is set atop a spindly plastered frame with ball-and-claw feet, a motif Li appropriated because of its Chinese origin (the original image was that of a dragon grasping a pearl). Hanging inside, more or less where a commode’s user would deposit their own intimate contents, is a solid casting of paraffin wax, preserving the contours of a plastic bag.

Like most people, Li carries a lot with her – memories, and voids where memories should have been. Also like most people, she keeps a great deal of that inside. But if her work is like a carrier bag, it’s left partly open, so you can take a peek in. She’s generous like that.