Yushi Li is a Chinese artist based in London, working primarily in photography. She holds an MA in Photography and is now doing her PhD in Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Yushi was nominated as one of the 100 RPS Hundred Heroines in 2019, and was one of the winners of the Female in Focus prize in 2021. She has shown her work in different countries and had solo shows in Malmö, London and Oslo. Yushi’s work mainly engages with the question of the gaze in relation to gender, desire and sexuality, culminating in the investigation of the male representation as an erotic subject in light of digital social networks.
About My Tinder Boys – words by Yushi Li:
In the project My Tinder Boys, I photographed different men I met through the online dating application Tinder. I look at them, I ‘like’ them, I make them become images of mine. The repetition of the process and similar settings in this series of photographs turns these men into undifferentiated and replaceable objects of my desire. Meanwhile, during these unusual dates, I am both the violator who tries to invade their private space and also the desiring object who participates in their vulnerability.
It can be seen that there is certain precariousness to the way these men stage themselves for my photographs, which revealed men’s uncertainty in knowing how to be erotic for the camera. By putting these men in the stereotypically feminine space – the kitchen, my work tries to question the binary view of gender, and to examine established ways of staging eroticism and intimacy.
