ARTIST STATEMENT: 

In Vessels, a digital series, Wei Li applies digital technologies to create computer renderings with hyperrealist details. She explores the intersection of advanced technology and computer-generated art while exploring hybridity. By replacing parts of ordinary objects with the human body/skin, she creates grotesque anthropomorphic hybrid containers which trigger the viewer’s visceral and emotional responses. Wei converts ordinary objects into a surrealistic anthropomorphic hybrid by covering parts of those objects in human skin, hair, lumps, and all. The body/skin activates commentary on the organic body, identity, and cultural and social diasporas. In the process, the digital objects are morphed into imperfect ‘vessels’ that help the artist to explore her identity as a Chinese Canadian female artist while conveying her emotional experience of living in a Canadian pluralistic society.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Wei Li is an emerging artist whose experience of being an immigrant in 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 started a new series utilizing modern technology to render digital surrealistic objects which creates a new vision of hybridity. 

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Instagram: @weiliart