White Space is pleased to announce Li Liao’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, “Prologue: Reproducing ‘That Person’ and the New Product Launch of Katliax,” opening on October 26, 2024, and running until January 10, 2025. On the opening day, from 3:00 to 4:30 PM, the artist will present a live performance, followed by a fashion show debuting new pieces from Katliax, a brand founded by Yang Jun.

In 2022, Li Liao launched the project The Wife Went to Start a Business in response to changes in his and his wife’s career and personal lives. As the project title suggests, Yang Jun left her stable job to start her own fashion brand. As the primary financial provider for the family, Yang Jun’s decision to start a business not only pursued her own professional ambitions but also introduced new uncertainties and possibilities for their household. In this project, Li chose to supplement the family’s income by delivering food, using the city as his “studio,” which allowed him to capture perspectives and sensitivities previously unimaginable.

In fact, whether in his earlier works such as Art is Vacuum or To Be a Better Man, or in The Wife Went to Start a Business and this upcoming exhibition, Yang Jun and the dynamics within their small family system have always played a key role in driving Li Liao’s artistic evolution. Over the past two years, Yang Jun’s fashion brand, Katliax, has achieved considerable success. This exhibition will feature an unconventional fashion show to present her latest creations, alongside Li Liao’s reflections on his own personal and artistic transformations over this period.

In the last two years, Li has honed himself as the direct subject of labor, meticulously refining both his material life and his thoughts. On one hand, he has actively restructured his lifestyle, while on the other, he has engaged in intense daily reading to “reshape his mind.” Li sees himself as a “Ship of Theseus,” constantly reworking and reproducing “that person.”

Creating semi-fictional autobiographical works based on daily life, Li Liao presents a series of real life situations mixed with artistic actions. Through his often allegorical and self-deprecating action strategy, Li Liao takes the initiative to set up or take advantage of a situation to reveal his concern for the real problems that plague society, applying “communal participation” to practicing what he preaches in micro-level social systems and under concrete circumstances. In this process, he also observes and questions the evaluation mechanisms and rules for family production, social production and artistic production and attempts to provide a set of playful strategies to deal with stress, thus evoking a rethinking of experience.