Exhibits,
Lǐ XīnɡYǔ (Echo Li) (李星雨), (on Island Island) There is no place for a rice cooker
View the project online here.
I live in a classic display room style apartment, also I call it classic international student apartment. Most of those apartment come with a poorly functioned kitchen. Mine one for example is really small, also fully white cheap material make it really hard to cook something real. One day I was making rice pumpkin cheese, there is no place for me to plug the rice cooker, but found the corner on the floor next to the kitchen. While the rice cooker cook the rice on the floor, I felt pity. Pity for the rice cooker.
I am not a rice person
Every time I say that in Australia, people looks shocked. In fact, I ever liked rice, I grow eat bread. I love bread. My grandma was angry because I don’t eat rice, for her without eat rice doesn’t mean a meal. A meal without rice is snack. Sometime for me to eat rice, she will break some white bread, dip in the congee, it’s the only way. Because of this, I be told I am ‘more western’. I got a western stomach. I I also got told, one day if I live oversea, I would fit in more. I felt proud for it. I was shamed of rice.
The rice cooker was my grandma brought to me when she came to Australia. I barely uses it, once a year maybe. I felt guilty, there is never a place for rice cooker.
Echo Li (Lǐ XīnɡYǔ) (李星雨) is a Chinese-born artist who started live in Melbourne in 2017. My practice spans multiple disciplines; a hybrid of painting, video, writing, photographs, and live performance. My work often involves translation. I translate langue, experiences, identity, reality, etc. To be ‘Un’ has been the key to my practices, and my works often came from this sense of in-between-ness by being Un. There are nostalgias, stories, humour coming from the ‘places’ I carry with me that I see them as the politics of identity.