Beijing Project n.04 Lulu Li 李心路

Lulu Li’s intervention in the factory is built on witty humour, intelligent provocation and sharp irony. Turning herself and her practice into a “mirror” of both the factory system and the previous artists’ projects, she questions us first of all as human beings. She touches the weakest points of our relational and hierarchical system and confronts us with the unsolvable contradictions between what we do and what we say, where we stand and where we pretend to be.

A quotation from Mao Zedong printed in transparent letters on the glass cube of the production office echoes Ma Yongfeng’s bold wall writings, but also sounds like a warning to everyone in a position of authority – artists and managers alike should remember that “those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”. Her micro-speakers won the workers the right to listen to music once a week during working hours, but keeping and using this privilege was left to their will and their ability to claim it. She then gave her old CD collection to be shared by all the employees: “You have the music and the device to play it… it’s up to you.”

Lulu Li’s art is participatory in a critical, engaging way. It does not assume that simply gathering an audience into an open dialogue is meaningful in itself: it confronts viewers with the need to make a choice and with its consequences. Leaving utopia and ideology behind, it faces the fact that every human activity needs constant questioning and negotiation; only by accepting and dealing with antagonism and difference, rather than smothering them, can a respectful and mature social bond be built. Her works create tension in the individual sphere and in the social contract, revealing its fragility and pointing to its most important regulating tool: individual responsibility.

When she assembles, paints, packs and stores the plant manager Gilles Uhrweiller as if he were an actuator, or asks us to choose between a T-shirt that says “human being” and one that says “talented human being”, Lulu Li makes us realise that, in the end, we all “produce” who we are and how we relate to others. Art cannot change things, but for a moment it may push us to suspend judgement, step back and simply see the other.

Lulu Li’s website