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Tender Giants
Amiko Li
November 01, 2024 – December 08, 2024Fuller Rosen Gallery is excited to announce the opening of Tender Giants, a solo exhibition by Amiko Li. Li’s collection of personal writings—addressed to lovers, family, and unfamiliar locations that feel like dreams—are woven into streams of durational photographs and snippets of moving images. Tender Giants captures critical points in time when memories bloom into desire and cycle back into silent scenes of wanting.
Join us for an opening reception on First Friday, November 01 from 6-9 pm.
Amiko Li, still from Tender Giants, 2014-2024
Li’s latest video installation consists of nightlights, bedding, seventy still images, text, and heavy breaths of empty screen. Tender Giants explores time, spectatorship, and patience framed through self-reflexive photography and the ability to freeze fleeting moments. Perfecting and refuting photographic techniques, Li’s Tender Giants resonates within an era where attachment is commodified on a global scale through intimacy capitalism via social media. The ability to locate potential lovers and the speed of a lens shutter flash like strikes on a matchbox; heating up and burning out into black. Flash and scroll—the actions of affection become inverted performance and empty gestures when channeled through a camera.
Amiko Li, still from Tender Giants, 2014-2024Li’s photographs and writings reference the tensions of international travel, longing, and the search for connection in a travel escapism world. Against the backdrop of dating apps and the commercialization of intimacy, Tender Giants journeys through love’s first glances and breakups—both physical and emotional—in poetic time. Not all is light and radiance, Li offers ample space for shadow and darkness; realms of intuition, reflex, and fantasy.
Guided by the soft glow of cloud, star, and moon nightlights, viewers are met by the absence of images; black screen time and white subtitles but no sound. Like aging suns, void and emptiness seemingly overwhelm the senses, but instead, they are being fine tuned into sensitive, harmonious bodies reading durational text. Revealing honest images from the heart takes monumental courage and Tender Giants allows audiences to melt into the deep recesses of desire and forgiveness. Li invites viewers to spend ample time within the installation and allows audiences to make use of the bedding provided to enter into a casual and friendly viewing environment.
Amiko Li, still from Tender Giants, 2014-2024Confessing deeply held secrets and guarded emotional states may seem passé due to social media trends and Tender Giants challenges this artificiality with a fresh authenticity. By giving himself permission to indulge in the personal and the unbearable, Li’s newest work flourishes with graceful vibrancy and sophisticated veracity. Soft greetings and gentle goodbyes fade into morning light and evening stars, Tender Giants continue quietly into night.
Amiko Li, too quiet to hear, performance at Center for Art, Research, and Alliance, New York, 2023Amiko Li (b. 1993, he/him) is a visual artist working in photography, text and video. His works explore the paradox of intimacy and distance. Born in Shanghai and based in Brooklyn, Li is the recipient of the PDN The Curator Award, Center Project Launch Award, and Royal Ulster Academy Portrait Prize. Li received his BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from Rutgers University.
Li has exhibited at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliance, New York; The Shed, New York; Ulster Museum, Ireland; Haus der Elektronischen Künste, Switzerland; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, China; Power Station of Art, China; and Flat Earth Film Festival, Iceland. His photographs and artwork have appeared in Adbusters, American Chordata, Artforum, Juxtapoz, New Yorker, T Magazine, this is tomorrow, and DIE ZEIT.