Awkward dilemmas

This exhibition presents two sets of works from artists LI Bangyao and LI Sen that explore two universal and awkward dilemmas faced by humanity in the digital age: loss and oblivion. While related, they are distinct in nature.

Li Sen’s installation Diary employs 3D technology to recreate an ordinary hard drive. Through 100 repeated castings, the hard drive—along with the text engraved on it—transforms from clarity to corrosion, ultimately resulting in the loss of the text. Using metaphor, the artist reconstructs his personal experience and ordeal. Over the years, Li Sen stored vast amounts of work-related data on his computer, all saved on a hard drive. When the drive failed without warning, all the information was irretrievably lost, plunging him into a void of amnesia. “Who am I? What have I done?” When data becomes the body’s memory, its loss implies uncertainty and unreality of identity. Data has begun to dictate our bodies and behaviors—we copy information, and in turn, we are copied by information, giving rise to “secondary humans.” Memory and identity are now governed by data, and humanity is gradually becoming an illusion.

Li Bangyao’s Nameless Poetry series, on the other hand, serves as a human rubbing of “oblivion.” The work consists of two parts:

Li Bangyao collected a large number of discarded industrial and household items from metal scrap recycling stations near his studio in Shunde, Guangdong. Using traditional manual rubbing techniques, he preserved their shapes and imprints on Chinese paper. Simultaneously, he reached out to poets, primarily from Guangdong province, and asked each to select one of their own poems, which he then processed into “Martian script” (intentionally garbled text) and printed onto the paper. The resulting imagery reveals an intriguing phenomenon: the fragmented industrial waste, as the remnants of human material life, and the scrambled Martian poetry, as the debris of human thought, both become unreadable. This juxtaposition highlights the incommunicability between the material and the spiritual—precisely the reality we face today.