How does art change once it’s placed on the body? The question as to whether fashion is art or whether there is art in fashion has long been controversial, but Yilun Li’s work seeks to reify the image of wearable art. Li’s Ethereal Convergence series is both tangible and unembodied, consisting of sculptural installations that combine reflective surfaces, translucent materials, and intricate, dynamic structures.
There is a devotional element to Li’s work, especially in the moving elements. In some sculptures, delicate florals reach to the heavens like branches while in others, biomechanical limbs swing pendulously downwards. Directional divides between the holy and perdition place the viewer in a purgation of purgatory: we are suspended, caught between the ephemeral and the eternal. Li’s approach to the question of spirituality in the digital age is semiotically rich and visually concise, sitting somewhere between the historical iconographies of churches and the chromatic icons of the early 2000s internet.
The biomorphic forms of Ethereal Convergence also speak to the tension between human and machine, natural and artificial. Li’s practice is ostensibly concerned with the space between the virtual and the real. The choice of materials — laser stickers, metallic UV gel, and mirrored acrylic — acts as a mediation between the divine and the designed. Light becomes refracted, reflections distorted, and shapes cast from shadows; these visual shifts are tempered by the viewer’s physical perception of the work in relation to their own position in physical space. The audience is asked to interact with these pieces almost ritualistically: the dialogue between physicality and abstraction forces us to confront our own boundaries and the fluid nature of self-perception in an increasingly digital world.
The pieces making up Ethereal Convergence act ultimately as vessels of intersection: materials meet and merge, but they are also sites where metaphysical ideas collide. Transhumanist values and traditional notions of artistic spirituality cut across and through each other, questioning the boundaries between the organic and the artificial, the divine and the synthetic. Li’s work suggests that the body, both as a physical entity and as a vessel for meaning, is a place where these opposing forces can coexist: it becomes both site and medium.
By embedding these materials in wearable forms, Li draws attention to how the body becomes a site of convergence for these dualities — human and machine, sacred and synthetic, natural and virtual. The body here becomes more than just a passive frame; it is a conduit for the tension between the fragmented, hyperreal version of identity of the virtual world and the corporeal, embodied experience of self in the material one.
Ethereal Convergence bridges a gap between the organic and the artificial by pulling one realm into the other: we swim between screens, watch light travel from wall to sculpture and back again, forms that shift between abstraction and representation. As reconciliatory meditation between the tangible and intangible, Li’s work formally fuses the natural world with the digital epoch.
