Gnortsmra
Yamin Li
Thursday, May 2, 2024
- Sunday, July 14, 2024
Central Library - 710 W. César Chávez St.
Gallery (2nd Floor)
About the Exhibit
Artist Exhibition Reception: Thursday, May 2, 2024, 5:30pm-7:30pm
Art-making Workshop with Yamin at Central Library's Signature AANHPI Event: May 19, 2024, 2pm-4pm, 2nd floor Art Gallery
Artist Statement: As an immigrant, I often feel out of place. Entangled in the present, I long for the past and worry about the future. Observing my own relationships with my family and friends reveals the impact our relationships to our surroundings have on our psychological beings. Art provides a way to explore my attachment to and detachment from my habitats in my journey.
In this series of paintings, I use childlike graffiti, playful shapes, humorous visual language and bright colors, to create visual images of everyday life. I put familiar habitual objects such as houses, trees, figures and toys together with seemingly random fragments extracted from our surroundings to portray psychological habitats and portraits. Through these paintings, we experience/re-experience, understand and embrace challenges of being out of place.
About the Artist
Growing up in Suzhou, China, Yamin Li never remotely imagined herself pursuing art. Even in her early 20s, it was for studying Molecular Biology that she came to the US on a student visa and enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin PhD program. But she soon grew apart from studying the effect of alcohol on human brains through science, and instead dedicated herself to studying the influence of culture on the human mind through art. Yamin started the BFA program at the UT-Austin College of Fine Arts in 2012. She has exhibited in many local Austin venues, including UT’s Visual Arts Center, Women and Their Work Gallery, Co-lab, EAST Austin, Julia C. Butridge Gallery, People's Gallery and Canvas | ATX Gallery, as well as in Shanghai and Chengdu during her recent two-year stay in China.