This newly commissioned video installation explores storm chasing, a phenomenon rooted in the American landscape yet increasingly witnessed globally through livestreaming and new media platforms. An exploration of Li’s encounter with accelerated digital flows, extreme weather systems, and the erosion of boundaries between physical and virtual life, the work repositions storm chasing from its North American origins as a universal metaphor for navigating the spiralling forces, namely algorithmic media and the commodification of lived experience, that shape contemporary life across borders.
Shuang Li, Alliance, 2026, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Kim Association. Photo: Chia Wei Ling
Pirated media shaped the artist’s early worldview—knockoff Nintendo, bootleg CDs, and the Myspace and YouTube culture of the pre-Great Firewall Chinese internet in the early 2000s, through which she absorbed geography, popular culture, and English (most notably from My Chemical Romance). These channels became her primary lens onto the world from her teenage home in the Wuyi Mountains, forging a personal perspective rooted in navigating fluid borders.
The exhibition and video installation share the title Alliance, after the Nebraska town Li passed through during her storm-chasing journey, where the entire town is essentially a train yard. Drawing from her ongoing fascination with non-spaces as existential conditions rather than physical locales, the installation—developed with architect Luis Ortega Govela of Office LOG—evokes the experience of being aboard a high-speed train in China, where one feels the tension and sensation of being perfectly still while hurtling forward, mirroring our highly mediated reality where one can anonymously witness distant disasters in real time from home.
In Singapore, a city known for its highly optimized infrastructure, climate mitigation, and seamless financial systems, these themes take on particular resonance. Beneath the efficiency of these circulatory flows lie the same tensions, the commission addresses environmental precarity and the constant velocity of digital life. Embodying a transnational perspective shaped by her own trajectory between Asia and Europe, Li invites audiences to recognize that feeling of being in-between, inhabiting non-spaces that are at once familiar and anonymous. In seeking ruptures within borderless systems of control, Alliance probes what forms of presence remain possible within increasingly mediated realities.
Shuang Li, Alliance, 2026, trailer. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai.
Alliance (2026) is commissioned by Kunsthalle Basel in partnership with Yenn and Alan Lo Foundation, on the occasion of Shuang Li’s solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel this June.
Courtesy the artist and Callie’s, Berlin.
About Shuang Li
Shuang Li (b. 1990 in Wuyi Mountains, CN) lives and works in Berlin, DE and Wuyi, CN. She received her MA in media studies from New York University in 2014. Situated in globalized communication systems and inspired by various localities and uneven information flows, Li’s work, which encompasses performance, interactive websites, sculpture and moving image installations, studies various mediums that compose the contemporary digital landscape, the material lives that support it, and more importantly, the cracks in between.
Recent solo exhibitions include I’m Not, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2024); Distance of the Moon, Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (2024); I’m Not, Swiss Institute, New York (2024); Cherish, Geneva (2021); and Callie’s, Berlin (2020). Her first solo institutional exhibition in Europe will take place next June at Kunsthalle Basel.
Her work has been featured in a number of biennials, including the recent 2024 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2024, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland (2024); the 2023 Kunsthal Charlottenborg Biennale, Copenhagen; and the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022). Li has also collaborated with Miuccia Prada with a special project for Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2023 fashion show.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SPECIAL THANKS TO
Mrs. Wong Pik Ching
Ms. Lynn Yeow
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