Talks - Yiqing Lei

An Interview With Yiqing Lei

July 2025

Yiqing Lei

instagram: @_leiyiqing_

Yiqing Lei (b.1999) is a nomadic artist who works primarily with sculpture in the expanded field. Through object making, site-specific installation, performance, book making, and photography, they create visceral, sentient works that engage the viewer through material presence and ephemeral resonance. Their work emerges from a state of wandering—searching retrospectively, visually, and directly from the body. Yiqing’s work investigates unspeakable sensation, intangible moments, and the condition of eternal wandering.

You have lived and worked across several cities. Has moving between places influenced the way you think about material, space or language?

Yiqing Lei: My art practice is as restless as I am—it is always mutating and changing. What is so special about a sculptural practice is that it is not about the world, it is in the world. It is vibrating and pulsating with question and possibilities, rather than reflecting answers and closing stories. My art practice is constantly reflecting on pulsating and existing.

Sometimes I find it very hard to be in a place, to understand or to feel belong. I find that I have to leave a place in order to appreciate it. When you leave, you can finally see the truth. So, my practice deals a lot with exile and return. It like Chantel Akerman’s movie “Les Rendez-vous d’Anna”. You are constantly on a train journey, the landscape is restless, forever changing and mutating. You are inconsistent and can not hold on to a specific thing.

Everything past quickly and the memory of it becomes the presence. The presence is in the memory, in the passing by, but it also returns, I consider the thing it returns to as sculptural, as something that is occupying the space. Like the bed I sleep in, the streets I walk repeatedly—like the once-exotic roads of Olneyville that slowly became familiar—and the textures of the things I carry with me through each relocation. There are metaphysical materials or spaces shaped by bodily movement and everyday habit that feed into my sculptural language. As I keep collecting, arranging and assembling fragments of experience, something slowly comes out of surface.

Your installations often feel quiet and spacious. How do you begin thinking about space when starting a new piece？

YL: I don’t think about space until I have an idea about the body. Unless the space itself is the body. Normally when I start a new piece, I work with the material for a long time, trying to pull strings of subconscious out of the material. Space is in conversation with my sculptural body all the time, but it usually comes out in my dreams. It is important for me to document my dreams, my diaries. Playing and drawing and imaging. I think about a physical object in relation to a corridor, a street, a private room, a open plaza, in a garbage dump. I engage with these curious in a process of “physical thinking”, through which I test and question their potential.

From 2019 to 2020, I worked with performance-based installation and site-specific installation a lot. I relied on specific, physical locations to create work. For example, the two site-specific installations I made in China during the pandemic—“Window of the World” and “Milk Delivery”—were conceived based on my close observations of their respective sites. In “Window of the World”, I noticed how the miniature architectural replicas inside the theme park created a striking visual contrast with the rapidly developing skyline just outside the park. Years ago, there was a photo of my mother sitting near the Arc de Triomphe fountain inside the park. Back then, there were no high-rise buildings behind her. But when I revisited the same spot to find that exact angle, the backdrop had transformed into a dense forest of skyscrapers.

That thin membrane between the park’s unchanging miniature world and the ever-evolving city outside fascinated me. I wanted to extract the mini-sculptures from the park and relocate them into the actual urban landscape—so they could truly exist in the flow of the city’s transformation, and more importantly, reveal the historical weight they silently carry.

I bring this spatial and site-sensitive awareness into all of my works. In many ways, I resist the idea that my work should only exist within gallery walls or formal art spaces. I want my work to live independently in any space—or to form a meaningful relationship with the site it inhabits.

There is a strong sense of incompleteness in your work. What is it about the fragment or the unresolved that speaks to you?

YL: When I was working with wood in Royal College of Art, trying to make something by working within the field of sculpture, but then I feel very oppressive that I actually have to make something. I hated the morality of sculpture - the idea that what is consider to be finish and complete. I was like mistrust and hated those standards. To some degree, it was intentional to leave everything unresolved. In ”Come as you are, as you were”, I embraced these offcuts: angular, broken, vague. They do not aim to become structured installations, but float and repel like shards of consciousness. These are linguistic fragments of a process—unnamed thoughts, stray ideas, perceptual traces. I allow myself not to know where they are headed.

I think of it as a trap — it was about entrapment, about certain belief systems, it was also on a practical level about how I was used to people walking past sculpture to go and look at the next video installation in a gallery system. I thought that the only way anyone can look at anything physical was to entrap them, they would then have to look for their way out. By looking for their way out, they would have to look at it, look at it as if it is a myth.

For me the unresolved is a constant state.

It is the failure of these wood pieces that fascinate me — This is what makes this work so real, like a human condition. And it is important to realize that we are all inconsistent and failed beings, beauty, coherent and completeness is just a utopia that can never be breached.

You have described some of your sculptural gestures as a form of writing. How do you understand the relationship between material and language in your practice?

YL: Sculpture is a language, it is a sentient language, which is not always visual. The presence of the physicality of it is an equal phenomenon to it. That phenomenon could be influenced by the weather, the rain, the sun, the heat, it could be fog, it could be sound - it is a vast, vast subject. Living and growing from the soil of post-modernism: identity politics, the politics of race, of gender, these influences has opened a vast range of possibilities that can often be centered on the image. For me, a sculpture language has always been a quest to find this thing that is not necessarily an image. But the image it creates is something you cannot escape. There is always an ambition that my sculpture can occupy something that is about anything else other than an image, but has to somehow hold on to an image. That conflict seems to be unlike any other art form and therefore its language is visceral, sentient — it is about presentness and it is about time.

Writing within the realm of making sculpture is a different kinds of writing - for different reasons and with different effects. The idea of physicality is perpetuated too through such writings. Turning to words is another way of communicating, with urgency, ideas and feelings in relation to my sculptural work. Turning to writing harnessed sculptural imaginings, providing them with new visceral realms. Writing is the process by which I allow memory to come back. It’s both a record and a form of healing. I feel like I’m in a semi-transparent state. What I create isn’t the object itself, but the edge of existence that cannot be spoken.

In my work "Come as you are, as you were”, this takes the form of books placed within the installation. Some hold photographs, some words. These words help the material world to ruthlessly opened up and rematerialised in urgent and fantastical ways. The whole installation then acts as a bigger book with sculptural text.

When do you reach for a camera? What does photography allow you to see or hold?

YL: Photography is a rupture from time.

I work with B&W film photography for its slowness and randomness. It helps me develop a vocabulary on how does objects exist in this world. I can accumulate this visual system of language very easily without the need of too much tools and studio space. I think photography transcended any didactic idea of sculpture. Making all of your experience, objects, spaces, texture into a pure visual system. It put the sculpture language to a expanding field which opens up many possibilities for me to investigate.

Photography allows me to be retrospective, it allows me to withdraw from the torrent of presence and look back on what I have been doing.

The relationship between sculpture and photography is a three- and two- dimensional exchange. It is to look to ways of rupturing the certainties of images or to assure an image. It goes both directions. It has to deal with perception.

A photograph can document, frame and contain sculpture - as an independent art work— at the same time as highlighting its forms, demonstrating its concerns and sharing its conditions, from its direct engagement with the material world to its reproducibility and continued life beyond the moment of making. This makes it a particularly rich terrain for exploration and poetic consideration, charging the spaces between two and three dimensions like no other medial combination. The intimate and atmospheric that a photo creates bring us closer to the unspeakable sculpture.

The books embedded in your installation require viewers to sit, kneel or lean in. What do you think about physical closeness and the body’s role in encountering your work?

YL: As I said earlier about the experience of people walking past sculpture in a gallery. It was emotionally charged for something to stop, to sit, to kneel down on your work. Because no-one really care that much about what it was doing. To make people care is to slow them down, to spent time moving forward and backwards. These books are embedded low, requiring viewers to crouch, sit, lean in. Reading becomes bodily. It asks to be approached, sensed, and awaited.

This physical closeness and body’s role in encountering is the experience for me to first encounter a process of making. I notice something in the world around me. Sometimes a specific moment or a slow realization of an influence. The initial encounter is the first power for me to make a work. I also want to translate this experience of initial encounter to the audience. The things happened in my life influence me to make such work and the work carrying this influence to the audience, seeping into their mind.

Glass, paper, wood, film - many of your materials are fragile or unstable. What draws you to things that may not last?

YL: How we choose our preferences, I think it has to do with compulsions, desire and drive. I think desire is intrinsically linked with lack, perhaps I am intrinsically attracted to fragility and temporality because the concept of protection and shelter resurface repeatedly.

The practice of making sculpture is a pattern of behavior that you return to by default, despite the dominant conditions surrounding you. For example, I would spend weeks of labor collecting glass strings, using them to make sculpture even though I know they will not last. To manipulate glass — rigid like a diamond, into something so thin that they can break into parts just by touching. I saw this Intrinsic qualities about glass just as glass excavate this intrinsic quality about me.

Fragile and unstable sculpture are always on the edge of failing and becoming, which means I am always trying to make a material do something, failing or succeeding on the edge.

It is exciting to work with material on the edge. For example, you want the wood to bend in a certain angle but it won’t behave, you want the paper structure to stand on its own but it just keep changing its form and break. Sometimes my work fades away with time, or I can’t ship them back to China. But in hindsight, it is always a negotiation, a disaster point where it feels as if it is never going to work and also a surprise.

You once wrote about allowing yourself to get lost. Could you share a moment in your process when uncertainty led to something meaningful?

YL: I never know what my work is about. It is all based on the experience of spending time with the material and the making process. I think sculpture defy verbal language in some way, it demands you as a viewer, as a maker to constantly move around and constantly forget and get lost. It is a process of getting lost, in a way you forget where you come from and how you arrive, and you also lose the idea of being able to know what this thing is “about”; I don’t think I know anything and know what to do with my hands, my eyes and my bodies until I make a gesture. It is so visceral, so physical, so other than a subject; it is a whole collection of physical nuances which seem to defy definition, or explanation, or justification. That uncertainty feels essential. I think it’s wonderful that my practice can never fully be pinned down. It lives in that in-between space, always slightly out of reach, always becoming.