TABBY LI

Working with obsolete and discarded objects, cast forms, and video, my practice explores logics of circulation, support, and containment through structures that echo the body and infrastructural organisation. Works remain deliberately inoperative, held at the point where coherence appears possible but never fully resolves, and waste is treated not as inert residue, but as material already entangled within systems of use and value. This allows me to construct provisional ecologies that operate at the periphery of daily life, suggesting conditions that extend beyond functional or aspirational frameworks.

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I introduce skin-like surfaces at points of tension and uncertainty, staging thresholds between surface and structure, interior and exterior, as contingent and perpetually compromised. In this way, the work registers strain through tension, stretching, sagging, and suspension; an arrested process in which relationships form and fail, and coherence remains partial and deferred.

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These materials enable me to trace how spaces are produced through objects within a consumer society, where shifting demands, functions, and aspirations generate surplus and obsolescence. My practice reconfigures these remnants into new assemblages, engaging their prior relationships to the body and the rapid turnover of technological forms, while proposing alternative bodily configurations or afterlives attuned to movement and attention. In this sense, objects both haunt and exceed their intended function, suggesting a future beyond the origin of intent.