Li Yilei is a Chinese-born, London-based artist and composer working across sound, text, performance and installation. Their practice attends to the shifting relations between body, space and perception, and to the quiet thresholds at which sound becomes gesture, atmosphere or absence.
Working with tape, theremin, acoustic and electronic instruments, field recordings, self-built devices, objects and organic materials, Li approaches sound less as a fixed composition than as a spatial and relational condition. Repetition, interference, resonance and silence are used to form environments that remain sensitive to their surroundings and to the bodies moving within them.
The theremin occupies a central place in Li’s performance language. Responding to distance and movement within an electromagnetic field, it makes small bodily deviations and unstable alignments audible. Through this continuous negotiation between intention, listening and correction, gesture becomes both a means of producing sound and a way of sensing space. This attention increasingly extends into choreographic and bodily forms, allowing movement, material and sound to enter into provisional states of balance.
Since 2017, alongside releasing recorded music, Li’s practice has encompassed live performance, installation and composition for film, theatre and dance. Their work has been presented internationally at venues and institutions including the Barbican Centre, Kings Place, Café OTO, Nottingham Contemporary, Tate Britain, V&A East Storehouse and esea contemporary in the UK; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art; Tai Kwun Contemporary; Lincoln Center; MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale; and YDP Space.
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