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Li Li Ren has been bidding farewell to language in recent years.

This distance makes her sculptures seem remote—as though they arrive prior to language, earlier even than the notion of “time.” We sense a quiet melancholy in this abandonment of language, of the well-ordered world, and of our recognition of the self.

Let us imagine a world in which “you” and “I” are tightly bound together—a world disregards the chaos in between. Perhaps this marks her first moment of remembrance. In this sense, learning language becomes a mode of forgetting the self.

(How might the pre-linguistic world be elaborated?)

According to Li Li,
Meanings flow according to repeating rhythms,
while lives are composed of shifting matter, supporting and sustaining one another.

As language withdraws, we are once again reminded of the structures and traces of matter—the marks of where matter begins.