The best auidence

2023

 

In this installation, Li Yu invites the visitor to position themselves in various roles through staged encounters with text within the work. As they move around the room, the sculptural approaches to the text emphasise the visitor’s modulation between listener and speaker. Through playful linguistic structures and the presentation of the text, which both require different approaches to reading or listening, the visitor assumes the different levels of authority associated with each role as they partake in different forms of address.

 

The cyclical structure of the work, which repeats phrases across the installation, echoes our experience of native-language learning in which terms of speech, and the careful use of words that may imply a sense of power, are learnt largely through mirroring our observation of others. While the phonetic alphabet is employed to show the intelligibility of sound across language barriers, words taken out of their original context both lose and gain new meaning through their positioning which is left for the visitor to decipher.