Qianqian Li is an artist, a worker and a daughter currently working and living in London. After graduating from Royal College of Art in Contemporary Art Practice - Public Sphere, she chooses to continue exploring more possibilities about the world, country, family and herself. Her work revolves around surveillance, voyeurism, lust and the human value of spaces. Sculpture, photography, writing, and performance are the main languages of her creation. Her latest work Homeland (2022) is an installation with photos that captured from the online real-estate agency, where the last archives of homes across the country before sale are preserved neutrally by panoramic photography. Qianqian aims to explore the imagination and boundaries of intimate spaces in digital age.
''Lately, I have been going through a sense of loss, my home was crumbling. My loved ones passed away, I left my familiar house, and I witnessed the lost motherland under the epidemic, the absurdity of the 21st Century. The feeling of home extends all over the world at this time. Imagination becomes extremely excited when confronted with the irrational, it builds walls with invisible shadows and comforts itself with protected hallucinations. I started the project Homeland because I unexpectedly revisited my childhood home which I was permanently separated from on the house trading platform. I wandered around every corner of strangers’ homes with the mechanical body, experiencing the joy of voyeurism, as well as feeling alienation — when a home became a commodity, for the former owner, all the privacy and emotional attributes were stripped away. I printed and framed these screenshots, and the family space became the protagonist of the photo. Qian Zhongshu wrote in the prose Window, Spring should be seen in the window! If the door implies desire, then the window means possession. At home, you own all the scenery you can see from the window. The photo frame has a similar function, according to Gillian Rose, the use of family photographs enabled people to create a sense of ‘homeliness’, a material environment that felt ‘homely’. People press the shutter on the thing they love, and they help the owner to take the thing they cherish as their own.''
