Artists and theorists have long conceived of the body as an entity that absorbs, metabolizes, and reflects the world—from Pierre Bourdieu analyzing our physical forms as both repositories and conduits of insidious biopolitics, to Donna Haraway promulgating that we are hybrid organisms deeply meshed with nature and technology. Such ideas of interpenetration mold the sculptures, installations, and performances of Shuo Phoebe Li, who treats the body as an amenable site of relationality, defying the notion of skin as its boundary.

Based between Los Angeles and Hong Kong, the Chinese-born artist engages with the concept of resilience—the capacity to persist and cope with adversity. Viewing it less as a virtue than a symptom of affective injustice, Li explores what it means to endure and adapt to discomfort, often creating kinetic, biomorphic structures that embody the psychosomatic toll of weathering pain. In See what you do to me (2025), a wall-affixed metal appendage revolves slowly, its spiked tip gently, precariously brushing against the phallic, gelatinous-looking head of a limb-like bough jutting from the floor. Wooden and inert, the latter stirs only upon contact with its rotating counterpart, caught in an intimate cycle of poise and unease.