Felix Li

2023 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts
More about the artist

Wok Palace 88

Performance, 2023.

Supported by a grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT, Kelly Douglas Fellowship, and Leon B. Groisser Fellowship.

Wok Palace 88 is a fictional and defunct American Chinese restaurant brought back to life through the institutional process of excavating, archiving, and displaying.

On May 15, 2023 at 6pm in the MIT Theater Arts Building W97, Felix Li performed “A Soft Grand Opening” for Wok Palace 88, which is based on a few shut down Chinese restaurants in the Boston area including Eldo Cake House and Joyce Chen’s restaurants.

The project began with an exploration into informal crowdsourced archives and a performance titled “washing remains” where Li washed photographs sourced from the Yelp of Eldo Cake House. Prior to the grand opening of Wok Palace 88, Li biked around Boston and Cambridge delivering the menus to the defunct restaurants and to buildings and households along the way. The menus were also slid under doors, left in common areas, and thrown into corners across campus.

“A Soft Grand Opening” featured a video installation using footage from the menu deliveries and informal archives, along with a performance where the artist played an archivist, curator, historian, collector, and subject. The artist presented and archived fabricated artifacts from the restaurant, embodying the histories ingrained in the objects. The performance asks what it means to embed time, memory, and place into objects and how they are consequently valued and commodified. It is a provocation on what it means to archive and institutionalize cultural objects, and how histories connected to material bodies are told.

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Felix Li, Wok Palace 88. Courtesy of the artist.

Felix Li, Wok Palace 88. Courtesy of the artist.

Felix Li, Wok Palace 88. Courtesy of the artist.

Felix Li, Wok Palace 88. Courtesy of the artist.

Felix Li, Wok Palace 88. Courtesy of the artist.

Felix Li, Wok Palace 88. Courtesy of the artist.

Son, Son

Video, 2022.

An autobiographical documentary about a series of voice messages left unanswered and filial piety. The artist intersperses clips of Boston’s Orange Line with clips of his mother tending to her own mother, while a series of unheard phone messages left for the artist are played.

Felix Li’s Son Son, still. Courtesy of the artist.

Felix Li’s Son Son, still. Courtesy of the artist.

Felix Li’s Son Son, still. Courtesy of the artist.

record record

Performance, 2022.

record record is a performance connecting the materiality of memories and their relationship to records and the body. Li uses a digital microscope to scan middle school records and his body while his parents’ cassette tape plays in the background and a live recording is projected onto a wall.

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Felix Li’s record, record. Courtesy of the artist

Felix Li’s record, record. Courtesy of the artist.

Felix Li’s record, record. Courtesy of the artist

languageisagun

Video, 2022.

languageisagun is a video of Felix Li’s mother reading his childhood writings with recordings of her skin, hair, and mouth overlaid with landscapes; it is an ongoing experiment on the haltering fluency of the accented tongue and its bodily connection to dictation and language attrition.

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Felix Li’s languageisagun, still, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.


Felix Li’s languageisagun, still, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.


Felix Li’s languageisagun, still, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.


Felix Li’s languageisagun, still, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.


Felix Li’s languageisagun, still, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

About the Artist

Felix Li is a first-generation undergraduate senior at MIT from Malden, Massachusetts studying Art and Design. His work spans video, installation, performance, sculpture, and print to investigate the materiality of memory and the domestic ephemera of the Cantonese and Taishanese American experience. His interests lie at the intersection of archives, erosion, maintenance, and language attrition.

At MIT, Li is involved with the Asian American Initiative (AAI) where he has engaged in arts advocacy and community organizing work. He is also an assistant editor and undergraduate researcher at ppppress, a student-run publishing and printing press at MIT.

Li will be pursuing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio at UCLA starting in fall 2023, and is a recipient of the Graduate Opportunity Fellowship.

More at Felix Li

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Christopher Joshua Benton looks directly into the camera with arms crossed, while standing in front of an artwork with spokes of lines radiating from the left side of the frame.