Rayna Li, It's a clockwork universe!
2020
Laser-engraved woodblock print on paper
This evolving series of works is closely tied to my art historical research on the collection of clocks in the Palace Museum. Conceived as fantastic showpieces and status symbols, these clocks have long captured my fascination with their visual richness. Yet, beyond an interest in the distinct aesthetics of these objects, I also investigate how formal decisions of design are socially embedded and systematically studied. Why do certain motifs recur, in a time when these clocks served diplomatic missions and evangelical ventures alike? Why is one element widely celebrated as the signature of a particular artist, while other designs are relegated to marginal positions and rendered nameless auxiliaries? What makes the ‘Palace Clocks’ emerge as a distinct family of cultural artifacts, instead of merely an assembly of mechanical instruments defined solely by their nominal function of timekeeping?
My current work attempts to investigate the aforementioned theoretical concerns through the physical act of retracing and reconstruction, responding to the practice of cataloging and its associated principles of cognitive mapping and systemic categorization. At the same time, my work is fundamentally rooted in an aspiration to foreground the ‘what-could-have-beens’. The reality is clear: a great majority of these objects have been forever lost. Instead of mourning an irrecoverable distance between us and history, my work evokes the whimsical imagination that is central to this genre of art. I seek to interject my own love of organic forms and approaches to surface design into established art historical styles. Using laser cut technology as the principal method of carving but referencing the principles of traditional movable type printing, I create original works that destabilize conceptions of the historical and the contemporary, the external and the personal, the real and the imagined. In doing so, I present a vision of this genre of mechanical art as dynamic, relevant, and full of possibilities.
