Alice Konitz on Lili Chin

Lili and I just met a couple of months ago. I was looking for a new roommate to share my apartment, and our good friend Katrin suggested that we would get along really well. Now we share the apartment in Westlake, Los Angeles by the historic MacArthur Park, and we have the best time! We already went on an awesome field trip together to see ancient Fossil waterfalls which she discovered a few years ago. We also both work with sculpture and film. I approach film from a background in sculpture, Lili comes from a background in film and is now working with sculpture and  installation.

She showed me images of her thesis show, “Nocturne Etudes” at UCSD: A big ice-ball hanging from the gallery ceiling, melting into a large, towering clay bowl, surrounded by sounds from the depths of the pacific ocean. Two gigantic, almost parallel, but inward leaning screens with projected 16mm films of the surface of the ocean, one showing a still surface with light movements, the other one chopping waves. They lead as a corridor up to the ball of ice. The length of each progression, from dusk to darkness lasts 10 minutes.

The third piece which connects the other two, and relates to you as a viewer in the space, is a small video projected into a box.

It shows a dancer who dances a choreography, which, when I think about it a day later, strikes me as an interpretation of the classic riddle of the Sphinx (Question, Sphinx: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?- Answer, Oedipus: Man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two feet as an adult, and then walks with a cane in old age.) When I ask Lili about it, it turns out that the reference is not intentional, but she does think about it as a life cycle. There’s an encounter with another person in the sequence, it’s not very obvious, the colors are dark, bathed in a dark blue light. The dancer seems to be filming herself while being filmed.  She holds a small, silver super 8 camera . In the end she is standing upright, frozen by strobe light, then falls, and crashes motionless to the ground. The light changes to a warmer color. When I ask if the dancer dies in the end I get an ambiguous answer – yes, but she also becomes alive, and she gets to rest for the first time. It may just be the end of a turbulent time. Lili talks about this piece as the memory box. Studying in San Diego, she spent a lot of time at the ocean. Refrigerating the ice into a globe, layer by layer, was an attempt at keeping some of the experience with her.

From the ice-globe I can imagine an experience of depth and mass while walking on the beach. Apparently it was quite cold in the gallery space as well.

The sound in the gallery stems from the deep sea recordings of Lili’s friend, David Barclay, a marine biologist whom I met briefly when Lili first came to look at the apartment. I learn that his scientific background was also instrumental in casting the ball, calculating the volumes of water that could be poured incrementally to create a smooth surfaced sphere out of stacked sheets of ice. (Just freezing the entire amount of water in the mold would not result in an even sphere.)

It’s interesting to me that Lili, coming from a film background focuses on the most elementary physical aspect of sculpture; the mass and weight of a material, and its different elemental states. I notice, listening to our recorded conversation, that she knows the weight of the ice-globe, as well as the clay bowl: 800 and 300 pounds!!

Wandering through the show must be like an immersion into a spatial memory puzzle. I enjoy spending time putting the pieces together. Walking between the two screens that feature different wave patterns will give you a sense of vertigo. It strikes me that the vertigo effect of both walls is probably achieved by the sense of different patterns visually rubbing against each other an effect that has fascinated many artists, most notably in the sixties.  Artists like Jesus Rafael Soto, Francois Morellet, or Bridget Riley explored the effect of the viewers movement confronted with regular or irregular patterns. Here you are walking through an aisle of two gigantic, but flat bodies of water. Lili mentioned that the show became a very playful experience, when visitors walked through it.

While talking about our work we found out that we’d both worked with theater groups for brief, but very influential periods of time. It somehow translated into our work.

There’s a lot more to find out, I’m looking forward to continuing the dialogue!

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