Li Xinmo

Piece Description:

Text: Li Xinmo

The inspiration for this work comes from ancient iconography picturing Fuxi and Nüwa, in which Fuxi and Nüwa are intertwined with the upper half of their bodies being of human form and their lower bodies in snake-like form.

I used lace, a symbol of femininity, and serpentine fabric to sew together a cylindrical snake-like body, bending and twisting these materials into an installation suspended in mid-air, with a crib placed on top of an artificial moss-paved floor beneath it. This scene symbolizes the birthing of the human being.

Text: Zhong Ting

As an eco-feminist artist, Li Xinmo extends the female body into nature, society, and culture, demonstrating her concern for women’s issues and ecological problems. As a totem of ancient fertility worship, Fuxi and Nüwa is a symbol of the handover from a matriarchal clan-based partnership to a patriarchal clan-based power relationship. The way in which founding myths are written often implies the way in which people are socially and culturally constructed. Li Xinmo employs feminine lace and serpentine fabrics to create the intertwined bodies of Nüwa and Fuxi, highlighting the “body politics” of women. Embedded in this ancient iconography, we see that humans, gods, and animals are integrated into each other, conveying confusion and awe that our human ancestors felt towards the mysterious power of nature. The fear of the unknown is enough to cause one force to plunder and enslave another. Underneath the installation we find a bed of artificial moss. This symbolizes the artist’s view that the skin of the earth is like a neglected or invisible ancient creature, breathing with us. In the Five Phases, moss belongs to the flexible, changeable and resilient yin of wood. In this installation, moss takes over the birth of new life with the yin power of the mother goddess.

Piece Description:

Text: Li Xinmo

This work is a rewriting and transposition of traditional Chinese painting. I use the snake as a symbol of animals, camouflage cloth as a symbol of the plundering of nature, as well as plant motifs. The juxtaposition of different symbols in this work makes people think about the relationship between humans and nature.

Text: Zhong Ting

In this work, Li Xinmo demonstrates her rebellion against “anthropocentrism.” Images of animals, plants, human beings, and their cultures are integrated into nature to form an organic whole. In the myth of the Mother Goddess, the Chaos God evolves all things in her own body. In the Taoist view of the universe, it is not difficult to perceive the “motherhood” of primordial chaos, for example, “An integrated being existed before the birth of Heaven and earth. How still! How void! Standing all by herself and never changing, she moves in and through all and is not wearied, worthy to be the mother of Heaven and earth.” (Dao De Jing, Chapter 25) Through the reconstruction of traditional painting forms, the artist provides a perspective of “return.”

Piece Description:

Text: Li Xinmo

I stirred different greens into a juice and used this green juice to wash white gauze. Then I wrote ancient Chinese landscape poems on this gauze, which consisted of seven pieces of gauze in total, with one poem on each piece of gauze.

Text: Zhong Ting

William Rueckert once put forward the idea of “poems as green plants” in “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” Plants have different senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste than animals do. The artist presents the intelligence of plants in the form of visual symbols in a poetic way.

Piece Description:

Text: Li Xinmo

This installation is part of the performance artwork Birth. An inverted triangle covered with green fur (simulated shaggy fur) hangs on the wall. On the spot I used a razor to shave, or carve out, the word “humanity” in it.

Text: Zhong Ting

For the artist, the upside-down triangle symbolizes the triangular structure of the female reproductive system. Judy Chicago once created an artwork in the shape of a huge triangular table as her feminist masterpiece The Dinner Party, with the female vagina presented from flat to three-dimensional on each dinner plate. This triggered people to think about the female body, identity, and gender with a strong visual impact. In “Postmodern Wetlands. Culture, History, Ecology,” Rodney Giblett uses the Mekong River Delta as a metaphor for female genitalia and pubic hair, associated with the flow, purification, cultivation, and regulation of the ecosystem’s metabolism in the wetlands. The artist’s carving of the word “human” on the triangle of fur seems to symbolize the disempowerment of women when it comes to gender. Should women have the right to be human before being labeled with a woman’s gender? The work reestablishes the female body as the source of life, doing away with the stigma associated with womanhood, while suggesting the complexity of humans and their ecosystems.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

These works blur boundaries between human beings, non-human beings, and the natural world, through the lens of animism. The artist seeks deep integration of spirit, soul, body, non-human species in the interconnection of all things in nature. She tries to arouse people’s “sense of empathy” for plants and animals while realizing self-healing. Throughout this artwork, we can observe the confrontation between humanity and divinity, the vitality of sexuality on the edge of life and death, sexual violence, and the disempowerment of women’s bodies, along with many other issues, including the occupation of women’s minds and bodies by the primitive fertility cult and the lie of fertility in the guise of modern technology.

Piece Description:

“These girls always come back to me when I remember the past, they are like my youthful years that have passed away with time.

I don’t know when I started to get depressed, the thoughts of misanthropy and death always lingered, the feeling that I had been dead, ever since some point in time. Daily wallowing in memories of the past was often accompanied by uncontrollable crying. For many years, it was through art that I healed myself. In fact, I didn’t make art, I just wrote down my real life.”

—Quoted from Li Xinmo’s personal art project, Woyeshi 我也是 (Me Too)

Piece Description:

In this work, the artist places her body in a symbiotic position with other species, so that life is reborn in a spiritual fusion with nature. In his “biophilia hypothesis, “ Edward Osborne Wilson argues that there is an instinctive bond between humans and nature, a bond which acts upon animals, plants, and landscapes. This instinctive desire to get in touch with nature can guide people to return to their spiritual homeland, heal their wounds, and gain the life force that Mother Nature feeds them with, even as they turn their backs on nature.

In this work, the artist places her body in a symbiotic position with other species, so that life is reborn in a spiritual fusion with nature. In his “biophilia hypothesis, “ Edward Osborne Wilson argues that there is an instinctive bond between humans and nature, a bond which acts upon animals, plants, and landscapes. This instinctive desire to get in touch with nature can guide people to return to their spiritual homeland, heal their wounds, and gain the life force that Mother Nature feeds them with, even as they turn their backs on nature.

In this work, the artist places her body in a symbiotic position with other species, so that life is reborn in a spiritual fusion with nature. In his “biophilia hypothesis, “ Edward Osborne Wilson argues that there is an instinctive bond between humans and nature, a bond which acts upon animals, plants, and landscapes. This instinctive desire to get in touch with nature can guide people to return to their spiritual homeland, heal their wounds, and gain the life force that Mother Nature feeds them with, even as they turn their backs on nature.

Exhibited Works