Intimate relationships are a game with no final move. Each approach tests a boundary; each retreat redraws the territory. In this play, there is no pure agency, no complete passivity—power flows in the intervals of speech, shifts in the exchange of glances, and is redistributed in the moment of touch and withdrawal. Asian women navigate this space, carrying the weight of inherited scripts, yet in every concrete moment, they reinterpret these roles in their own way.
Li Jingyi's work employs fibre as a language, exploring this subtle state of being within the apertures of lace and the drape of fabric. Lace holds its own paradox—precisely woven from thread, yet breathing through its voids; seemingly delicate and dependent, yet its very texture reshapes the contours of what lies beneath. It mirrors the subject in intimacy: giving while holding back, clinging while guarding boundaries, maintaining an unmoved core beneath a soft exterior. These labours of time and patience, these feminine crafts passed through generations, transcend mere technique here. They become the very development of experience—each stitch a dialogue with history, each knot a reaffirmation of self.
In the emotional history of Asian women, intimacy has never been a purely private realm. It bears the weight of family expectations, carries cultural burdens, and is interwoven with the gazes of the past and future.The ways of loving and being loved were written long before individual awareness. Yet, precisely within this prescribed script, each concrete woman seeks her own tone—a flicker of hesitation within compliance, a measured boundary within devotion, a guarded inner territory within attachment.They are neither simple victims nor outright rebels. Reducing women to passive bearers of power structures obscures the far more complex reality of intimacy. This is not confrontation, but continuous negotiation; not escape, but discerning the breathable gaps within entanglement. In every specific moment of intimacy, they renegotiate those given roles in their own way, carving out their own voice within the established script.
This state materialises in the artist's work into tangible forms. Figures leaning on each other yet maintaining distance, boundaries intertwining without fully merging—between them flows an ambiguous tension. Each approach tests the other's limit; each retreat redefines the self's contour. This is not a static state, but an ongoing process: giving and taking, controlling and yielding, longing and defending, all continuously negotiated and reset within this fibre-built space.The rules of the game are rewritten during play; victory or defeat remains suspended until the very end.
Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, introduced the "punctum"—that detail which pierces the viewer, leaving them no escape. It need not come from a violent shock, but always arrives unexpectedly, leaving its mark on softness. In Li Jingyi's work, softness itself becomes such a punctum. It enters in a seemingly harmless form, yet at a certain moment of contemplation, its pores suddenly open, letting forth concealed pains, suppressed desires, and yearnings hidden by daily life. Every opening in the lace is a potential punctum—they invite the gaze in, but at the moment of entry, make the viewer realise: they themselves are also being watched, scrutinised by these silent fibres.
Love always carries with it the loosening and rebuilding of the self's boundaries. The encounter with the other is both a threat to and an expansion of the self.The personified perspective given to everyday objects precisely reveals this: when chairs lean on each other, they do not lose their own structure; when fabrics cover one another, the texture of each layer continues beneath. Perhaps true intimacy lies here—in approaching without consuming, in giving without depleting, in fusion where individual contours remain discernible. This is not the dissolution of boundaries, but their renegotiation; not the surrender of self, but its rediscovery.
Forms constructed from soft materials thus become a testament. They bear witness to the warmth left after bodies depart, to the resonance after dialogue ends, to the wistfulness after an embrace loosens. In these subtle traces, we glimpse the true face of intimacy—not the perfect union of romantic narratives, nor simple power possession, but a continuous game fraught with complexity and ambiguity. Attempts to simplify intimacy into moralistic scripts of either-or ultimately fail to touch the fluid, unnameable truths within the folds of daily life. Those apertures are both barriers and passages; those entanglements are both constraints and embraces. Those puncta lie hidden in these softest places, waiting to be touched, waiting to open their eyes in the moment of contact.
Between each other, there always remains an unspoken, unnamed territory, awaiting each reentry.
Text/ Krish Liang
