About AFH
This audio is from our virtual studio visit with artist Wei Li in conversation with Steven Harris, and was originally recorded on October 26, 2021 over Zoom. Video episodes are available on the AFH website.
About the artist
Wei Li is an emerging artist whose experience of being an immigrant to Canada provides her with crucial inspiration in her practice. Having grown up in China and trained as a contemporary artist in the West, her dual cultural background challenges her to integrate different cultural perspectives and creates tensions through the contradictions inherent in forming a new hybrid identity.
Li completed her BFA (with Distinction) from the University of Alberta in 2017 and since has participated in shows/residency across Canada and the US. She had solo shows at the Art Gallery of St Albert and Harcourt House Artist Run Centre. In 2017, Li was a finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and her work was shown at the National Gallery of Canada. Li will attend the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Residency in New York this year. She recently starts a new series to utilize modern technology to render digital surrealistic objects and creates a new vision of hybridity.
About the work
In my practice, I’m searching for a visual form to address the complexity of hybrid identity, as well as the subjective and the emotional experience of living in a socially and ethnically diverse modern culture. The experience of being an immigrant to Canada provides me with crucial inspiration in my practice. This dual cultural background not only provides me with a broader ability to see diverse energies in society but also challenges me to integrate different cultural perspectives. The contradictions inherent in forming a new hybrid identity have entered my work and continue to create tension within it. In my new digital series, I retexture the surface of the digital sculpted models that I create on the computer with photo scanned high-res human skin texture to grant those objects a sense of humanness, exploring the possibility of creating a new vision of hybridity.
About the co-host
Steven Harris recently retired from teaching at the University of Alberta, after twenty years of working there. He published his book Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche with Cambridge University Press in 2004; co-edited a special issue of Art History with Natalie Adamson in 2016; and is one of five editors of the International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, which was published in three volumes from Bloomsbury in 2019. He also published a study of the 1959 International Exhibition of Surrealism in Art History in 2020, contributed an essay to the catalogue for the centennial exhibition of the Danish artist Asger Jorn for the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen in 2014, and an essay to a special issue on Jorn for the journal October in 2012. He has written essays about Sherri Chaba, Lyndal Osborne, and Lisa Turner for exhibitions in the Edmonton area, and is currently working on another one about local artist Richard Boulet. His major work in progress concerns a singular group of artists, poets, dancers, and musicians who collaborated in Alabama from the 1970s to the 1990s, provisionally entitled Pataphysics and Surrealism in Alabama.