Mousse 74
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Today, diplomatically isolated and subject to cyclical brain drain, youth in Taiwan live on both “treasure island” (one translation of the Ilha Formosa) and “ghost island” (a place with no future and no hope).
Central to Li’s work is his interest in the evolution of style and subjectivity as mediated by power dynamics across racial, sexual, class, and national boundaries. From the eighteenth century through the twentieth—while queer signs like the mannerisms of the by-then-obsolete European aristocracy were being adopted by cosmopolitan homosexuals in dis-identification with the increasingly dominant and normative social body of the bourgeoisie—growing exchange between East and West spawned fantasies permeated by fear of the foreign, resulting in Europe’s assimilation of other bodies, desires, and aesthetic traditions into its own canon.
Around the time museums reopened in New York (movie theaters did not), the first solo exhibition of London-based artist Josiane M.H. Pozi was held at Gandt, a gallery project space in the residential neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. Pozi’s show was titled after the affecting short film Pingey (2019), shot when she was only twenty. The work’s lo-fi production (fixed or handheld camera) and heartbreaking proximities (three friends laughing, crowded around a small kitchen table, et cetera) struck a strangely nostalgic tone, while its reflexive anguish anticipated the tragedy of the present, which was (also) already tragedy then: cool neglect for the living.
My main obsession is fabric, because salvaging is so important. “What are you adding?” and “How can you not add so much?” are questions I’m asking myself in the studio every day with regard to my material practice. I don’t think that art professionals and artists should be exempt from conversations about the environment, given that they are perpetrators—look at the waste produced by art fairs, artistic production, jet emissions.
