Carrier Bags from the Peripherals

Carrier Bags from the Peripherals takes its cue from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which sets the gathering and holding of things against the heroic narrative. Curated by Li Yalun and Qian Mengni for the fourth season of New Culture Producers, a programme launched in 2021 by Power Station of Art and the CHANEL Culture Fund, the exhibition brings together 31 works by 17 young artists and architectural practices on the theme of text and art. Rather than telling a story of conflict and climax, it describes a peripheral condition through texts and artworks scattered in and around a ring of display structures.

Li Li Ren showed Sunset as Burning Bruise (2022), an installation of two golden sheets of copper with feathers held inside, drawn together by a brass curve led by a marble toe. The work evokes a light, ticklish bodily sensation and the moment between day and night when the boundary between reality and illusion dissolves.