Yunqiu Li (they/them)
Yunqiu Li is a multimedia artist, photographer, and performer, currently living in Glasgow and China. Posthumanism is the core of her series of works. Her works span 3D animations, video game-like moving images, and virtual performance, which mix reality with virtuality to represent the world we live in.
Education
Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, BA Art History and Theories, 2015
Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, MA Fine Art, Experimental Art, 2019
The Glasgow School of Art, Master of Letters in Fine Art Practice, Performance pathway, 2020
Works
Control —— Yunqiu Li
Donna Haraway said: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” Haraway foresaw the possibility and similarity in science-fiction pieces, advocating a cyborg perspective. It’s a huge system, including technology, human, body modification, population crisis, gender identity, genetic engineering, and so on.
Posthumanism is the core of Yunqiu’s works. She has been thinking about the relationship between the body and Posthumanism, between control and being controlled. How Posthumanism is facing up to the huge impact of science and technology on body shape and the great expansion of diversification on body concept. Then, she created her own posthuman avatar based on her actual face, which performs in the digital world. Nonbinary digital posthuman avatar not only performs in the virtual world as Yunqiu but also can be anyone in posthumanism world view.
Control
The final work was a video with a mixture of animation, real shots, and special effects. Initially, Yunqiu was transported into a post-human world. The flat body, uncertain gender, Hunched-back, and baldhead were designed by her based on scientists' prediction of the future of human. Then post-human was walking around and explore the post-human world. Then it was controlled by the machine and became a cyborg. Human and machine merged into a cyborg, it controlled the machine and also was controlled by the machine. Yunqiu's Avatar completed the transition from human to posthuman to cyborg. But it seemed to be monitored and controlled by someone outside the screen.
