Li Xiaofei “Assembly Line”

Art100

[Image: Li Xiaofei "Assembly Line-No.10" video installation]

This event has ended.

In the 1891 Project Space, Shanghai artist Li Xiaofei constructs an installation featuring videos created over the last several years — four pieces from the remarkable Assembly Line series, and recent videos A Cart of Coals, A Packet of Salt, and Chongming Island.

Li Xiaofei is interested in “all kinds of truth;” what he calls “the paradox between truth and reality” pervades his video work. Li’s Assembly Line series has received global recognition since it was begun in 2011. He shoots, seemingly without judgment or inflection, the constant, repetitive, mechanical reality of factory work. And his worker interviews, interspersed at unexpected junctures with these images, tell of resignation, boredom and unfulfilled desires. Yet, these oddly touching videos are not particularly about how work dehumanizes. Factories and assembly lines are, after all, purely human creations, and Li says, “I found the relationship between human and machine…strange and complicated…the factories I shot are brimming with a surprising collective romanticism.” A Cart of Coals is rooted in Li’s early life in Hunan Province. Members of his family worked in the mines, and through his family, he has stayed abreast of how his mining town and the people in it have developed and changed. Salt, a condiment rather than a necessity, plays an unremarkable role in most lives, except those of the workers for whom reality, as evidenced in A Packet of Salt, is producing and transporting it. Chongming Island, Li says, is about people and consumption. Like many of his generation, Li recalls that his father was loath to part with any item that was still useful. Today, it seems, we are loath to hold on.