You are me
Book Review
Artist: Li Ye Zeng Yi
Photobook: You are me
Publisher: Lato Paper
Specs: Softcover, 210 x 300 mm, 200 pages
Price: €50
Sometimes, I forget how much of a privilege we have working as artists in democratic societies where art doesn’t face (as much) censorship as in different political systems. This thought especially came to my mind when I got in touch with Li Ye Zeng Yi (b. 1992, China) during the process of making XXX. His images fascinated me as they were completely different from what I have seen before, there was no artist that I could compare his work to, which I find incredibly rare in the “copy of a copy” visual culture. Highlighted by analogue techniques, expired film, and strange colour palettes as a result, I wanted to know more about the way he works.
Li told me that all his photographs are produced in secrecy. There is almost no information about his true identity — his real name and location. In his daily life, he is a clerk while at night, he takes out his Polaroid and large format camera to enter underground queer spaces and later store images somewhere in a basement. This mystery, secrecy, and contradiction are then directly reflected in his photographs and paintings that were now published in his first monograph You Are Me by Lato Paper.
“You Are Me feels as if one went to a thrift store and discovered a box of old photographs from a deceased person.“
What you can see inside are images created both in private and public spaces, yet we are not necessarily getting a glimpse of reality. They lie somewhere in between as the aesthetics of expired film, scratches, fingerprints, and ephemeral colour hues provide a rather dream-like and psychedelic quality. Their surfaces and textures go beyond the visual, making us want to pick up each negative, touch it, and feel it up close. Additionally, many images are missing significant parts of the frame, as if they were destroyed, not meant to be seen, or give the impression that they might disappear. The sense of time is, therefore, temporary and transient where Li’s photographs come as apparition from an unknown world.
You Are Me feels as if one went to a thrift store and discovered a box of old photographs from a deceased person. Finding Li’s images, it’s hard to place them in a specific time and place due to their expired nature. As a viewer, we are left searching, wondering if these materials are something we were not meant to see. There is ultimate tension felt from the people photographed in intimate settings and our sudden relationship with them. They appear lost and suspended in time, turning it into a confronting interaction. The artist’s presence is rather looming throughout the publication — a phantom questioning his own existence.
In relation to his Polaroids, he says: “Polaroid photography makes me feel like I’m out of touch with this time, space, and world. I use the past to shoot the present, which gives me the feeling of looking at the present from the future.” His paintings, on the other hand, contain a strong ancestral energy, showing distorted figures interacting and aesthetically resembling cave paintings. When encountering them in the book, there appears to be a shift from a deeply personal perspective (that of his photographs) to something more universal (in his paintings). They are primal, suggestive of the society we live in and our positioning in it. Li, therefore, blurs the media together to construct his own, somewhere on the verge of balance and antithesis.
“I hope that ultimately, even though it may not be possible to achieve it in this lifetime, one day I will be able to transcend success and failure, right and wrong, race and physical and biological attributes, and return to units like atoms, and not to be entangled in nothing anymore.”
Considering Li’s use of invisibility, the term “opacity” from queer theory comes to my mind. The artist and writer Zach Blas defines it as an unknowability and poetics coming from a deeply ethical position that involves countering existing forms of domination, with the aim of exposing “the limits of schemas of visibility, representation, and identity that prevent sufficient understanding of the world and its peoples.” In a similar manner, José Esteban Muñoz discusses in his book Cruising Utopia (2009) the concept of camouflage as a refusal of the natural order while simultaneously being strongly related to nature. Correspondingly, camouflage to Muñoz reflects the “impossibility of another world, of a different time and place” where its relationship to nature mirrors the queer potential that is currently unimaginable in straight time and space. Blas further proposes that in the case of queer opacity, invisibility plays an important role because it adopts politics of “anti-identity, anti-state, anti recognition” and hence, “politics of escape.”
This desire to escape can be felt in Li’s own words when he commented on the book’s accompanying exhibition: “I hope that ultimately, even though it may not be possible to achieve it in this lifetime, one day I will be able to transcend success and failure, right and wrong, race and physical and biological attributes, and return to units like atoms, and not to be entangled in nothing anymore.” His longing to literally embody nothingness exists exactly in the realm of antirecognition and anti-identity.
The subversive and controlling aspects of surveillance technology are particularly relevant to the field of photography where the camera can be understood as a multipurpose object that can simultaneously function as an improvised weapon as well as a useful tool. The camera is, on one hand, an apparatus of control as it is programmed to make things and subjects visible. In the biopolitical age, the camera uses an invisible process to further track and control the subjects it captures (especially certain racial and gender non-conforming individuals). On the other hand, the users (such as Li) who are aware of the functionality of the camera and have the capacity to reverse this controlling process also have the opportunity to subvert the system by using the camera to portray invisibility and hence, to become unreadable to the system.
For Li the medium is not important: “I don’t care what photography is, I only care about my feelings. My uneasiness comes from the real world. I’m pretty sure the source of my uneasiness is not my imagination. I want to record something. I want to see myself from others. What, I want to know the answer so bad, but I don’t want someone to guide me and tell me this is my life. Slowly I became numb, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t care what I used. What I cared about was proving that I was alive and different. What I express is my way of life.”
Did we steal someone’s existence just by looking at this body of work? Or did we become part of it simply by engaging? You Are Me provides an intriguing insight into Li’s subconscious, featuring both the ordinary and the unconventional. As a viewer, we are invited to read in between the lines to recognize the layeredness of this body of work. It is a journey of concealment to reach the truth. A narrative of destruction, of the artist and our own. An uncomfortable mirror.
You Are Me is available for purchase via Lato Paper here.
Li Ye Zeng Yi
studied art in high school and graduated in dramatic, film, and television arts. Prior to You Are Me, he published a zine Innocent Clerk Vol. I which is a precedent to this monograph.
Lato Paper
is an independent publishing house focused on contemporary multidisciplinarity founded by @these_foolish_things and @insect_panic
Text by Linda Zhengová
Curator of Discarded Magazine & XXX
She is a photographer and writer dealing with the topics of trauma, gender and sexuality.
