LE XI 奚乐

Shovel Snow in the North 2024

In the monotonous, boring, and repetitive life habits, I am engrossed in searching for the poetic moments that hide the individuality and capturing the subtle contradictions. This work can be my "self-portrait" or the "self-portrait" of all people, in order to find and verify the unique and imprinted moments in our lives.

Blank Flame 2024

Flames, while familiar in our daily lives, hold a mysterious power. They transcend time and our everyday experiences, sparking my interest in their ethereal nature. This artwork focuses on a single flame, as I attempt to capture the ever-changing flicker between the flame and the gentle breeze. By overlaying images, I aim to measure the intricate variations and unravel the secrets of the flame. Using a wooden ruler bearing the marks of time and my trusty smartphone, I meticulously capture frames and manually record time to make comparative measurements, seeking to understand the enigmatic dance between the flame and the wind. The gap between visual perception and sensation has led me to realize that the movement of the flame exists on a different plane from the flame itself. As I strive to capture the misalignment of these two planes, I encounter a perceptual gap between my observations and the flame, akin to an indescribable realm. It surpasses our sensory observation and comprehension, requiring the reliance on inner intuition, emotions, and imagination to perceive and explore. This void transcends the limitations of the material world, serving as a realm of freedom that transcends the boundary between yin and yang. This artwork focuses on the gap between the tangible and intangible aspects of fire. By subtracting the temperature and heat, I abstract the flame and use size comparisons to depict its flickering. In this way, I attempt to quantify the mystery of the flame. Through this approach, I aim to experience a fleeting, liberated, and unpredictable parallel world. By overlaying images, I hope to open the gateway of perception and experience for the audience, allowing them to feel the unique touch and awe of the flame, and discover their own perception and imagination within that indescribable realm.

Dynamic Resonance 2024

This artwork is inspired by my experience of riding the subway at high speed. In that moment, I didn't just feel like a passenger standing there, but rather, I felt connected to the subway's rhythm and became a part of it. As the subway moved quickly, I tried to maintain my balance and sync my arm with the passing tracks. This inspired me to create something. I carefully felt the force pushing me back when the subway suddenly started, merging with its acceleration. This experience made me realize the strong connection between modern technology and our bodies. The subway is a symbol of technology and city life, and it greatly influences our daily experiences. Through "Dynamic Resonance," I aim to capture the harmony between the arm and the electric subway in a pure artistic form. I want to emphasize the excitement of speed and express my fascination with future technology. In this artwork, I used my phone to record the subway ride, focusing on the tracks outside to synchronize my movements with the train. By layering and overlaying the visuals, I highlighted the relationship between the arm and the subway tracks, showcasing the subway's fast motion and the body's balance. This creative process aims to capture the moment when humans and machines resonate harmoniously. It explores the possibility of harmonious coexistence between humans and the artificial environment, and seeks to establish a new balance between humans, nature, and technology.

Smartphones 2024

This is a line-drawing animation about "gestures" that is inspired by my everyday experiences. With smartphones becoming an integral part of our bodies, it has made me think about the relationship between phones and gestures and explore how technology and the human body can merge together. I tried to capture gestures in a new way by isolating them from their everyday context through line drawings. I depicted actions such as using the phone, observing it, and contemplating its significance, all happening simultaneously through the lines. By drawing gestures frame by frame, I experienced a world that goes beyond reality, where digital enhancements reshape our everyday lives. Throughout the process of drawing gestures in continuous motion, I not only understood how phones integrate with our fingers, changing the way we interact with the world and communicate with others, but I also explored the potential of gestures as a universal language that surpasses cultural and linguistic barriers, as well as the immersive experiences that "mechanical gestures" can offer. This line-drawing animation is my expression of our shared existence in the digital age and a reflection of my personal adaptation and experience of digital life. Through this creation, I aim to explore the space between phones and gestures, technology and the human body, and how they shape and influence our interactions with the real world.

In Sync 2023

I try to copy young trees and move in sync with them. I'm fascinated by the short-lived and expansive qualities of saplings, along with how they move uniquely. By paying attention to my body, I aim to understand how saplings find balance in our environment and explore where humans and nature meet. Even though the movements of saplings are quick and easy to miss, it's precisely their fleeting nature that gives me a delicate and agile feeling, inspiring me to create. By recording and breaking down the way saplings move through pictures or videos, I get a better sense of their rhythm. When I compare my own arm movements to theirs, I truly understand why interacting with this artwork is so important. This interaction brings a natural and interesting experience to my body. My art is all about experiencing the supernatural power that saplings possess through physical perception, rather than just expressing specific ideas. Through visual recordings that highlight the short-lived, fragile, and lightweight aspects of saplings, I want to show the incredible and mysterious connection between saplings and our living world. By existing permanently in the online realm, I hope to convey a deep respect for nature.

Raindrops 2023

In the artwork "Raindrops," I captured the falling raindrops, allowing myself to feel the mysterious energies of the universe. I saw Earth's gravity as an unseen brush, letting me craft visual art by blending Earth's pull with the raindrops. Using my phone, I recorded and used a computer's power to break down each raindrop, showing their depth and energy through shifts in color and brightness. While I didn't know how the final piece would look in terms of patterns and animations, this mechanical process allowed me to experience the flow and change of energy and matter in nature, immersing me in its wonder and beauty. In this artwork, I integrated the falling and energy of raindrops into the creative process. By adjusting pixel colors and brightness, I used brighter shades and larger pixels to illustrate the ripples created when raindrops hit the ground, making them look more three-dimensional and textured while also displaying their interaction with the environment. It was as if I watched the sky gifting the earth with fireworks, immersing myself in the magnificence and mystery of raindrops. Frame by frame, as I put time and effort into replicating, I gradually understood the importance and worth of this process. This artwork doesn't just show respect for nature and trust in technology, but also offers another way to explore the deep and mysterious forces of the universe. I firmly believe that an enigmatic and unpredictable natural realm exists in our everyday lives.

The Union of Self and Objects 2023

I have collected items that I carried with me for 20 years, attempting to digest and accept the changes of the times, as well as the changes in my lifestyle and work. These items reflect how my body has been redefined in the digital age from a different perspective. Over the past 20 years, these items have been phased out and updated, but the intimate relationship between them and my body has witnessed the essence of all the bodily movements and gestures I have experienced. These items can be seen as receipts for the fusion of digital and real-life over the past 20 years, and I want to use them as the basis to recreate my "relaxed dynamic." To achieve this goal, I use the technique of stop-motion animation on my smartphone to arrange and move these items, seeking a game that transcends reality between the real and the imagined in artistic form. Through this process, I can experience how time unfolds in the arrangement and movement of the items and how it is transformed into a form and digital structure. At the same time, I am also exploring how to break the boundaries between material and spirituality with a strong conviction and avoid working mechanically. I focus on the continuous movement of digital images and try to redefine the relationship between the body and items in the digital age by imitating the self-contradictory ability between vivid materials and the intangible means of "relaxed dynamic," exploring the interaction and possibility between the digital world and real life, and bridging the gap between experience and the physical world. This is a work that combines digital art and physical objects. I hope to raise people's awareness of the sensitivity of body and material life through my work, use our inherent contradictory abilities to better understand the differences and connections between the digital world and real life, understand that making motion digital images provides another immersive experience, and gradually transform material life into the non-material realm. In short, by focusing on inner experiences, discovering the potential of bodily participation, and re-establishing connections with nature and the real world, we can gain a more profound and comprehensive experience of life.

Breezes of Chongqing Summer. 2023

Living in my studio, I have come to deeply appreciate that life itself is a work of art. I hope my work can merge with the mysterious power of nature. Every morning, I can see the interaction between the curtains and the breezes as soon as I open my eyes. Today, I put on a colorful ribbon to capture the traces of the breeze. I focused on the fluttering of the ribbon in the wind, but my experience wavered between color and wind. I held my breath and recorded this video, trying to distinguish to what extent the "wind" was accumulated from artificial things, while also looking for evidence to prove the mark of true nature. However, I became entangled between the artificial and the natural, beginning to doubt what is artificial and what is natural. Is the fluttering of the ribbon really the trace of the breeze? Maybe it is only the color line that Paul Klee pursued, or the continuous vibration of color blocks like music scales in Mark Rothko's window-style paintings, or even the fluttering of mysterious butterfly wings on the horizon. Although I cannot be sure, through these elusive comparisons, I hope to explore the relationship between nature, artificiality, and art, and bridge the gap between experience and the physical world. This "gap" is a major problem in my work and life, and I want to understand the mysterious connection and boundaries within it. Though my life may sometimes appear monotonous and mundane, I cannot fathom any other way of living. Within the confines of my studio, I have come to deeply realize that life itself is a work of art, and the sensation of 'feeling the gentle breeze' remains an eternal and ineffable subject, transcending both emotions and thoughts, carrying a meditative and mysterious significance. When it comes to the question of 'what is art,' I have always held a skeptical stance due to the occasional absurdity of this world. Nevertheless, I aspire to transform numerous aspects of life into art and endow them with fresh possibilities.

Cleaning Windows 2023

In my studio in Chongqing, I started cleaning windows. Through them, I could see the changes in the city and the three-dimensional distant view. I focused on cleaning the dust of the city with a double-sided glass cleaning tool, keeping the windows transparent. I immersed myself in this concentrated work. The sound of the glass scraper and the scenery in front of me echoed each other. My movements were like the painting gestures that spanned the frame, slowly moving, rising and falling, scraping and wiping. Three years later, after the epidemic, I returned to my hometown and used window cleaning to rediscover the cityscape. I felt like a painter, thinking of Willem de Kooning's action painting. I set up a video camera and recorded my performance, but at the same time, I was just cleaning the glass. I enjoyed the transformation between the roles of a cleaner, an actor, and a painter. This transformation made me feel the charm of the intersection of art and life, while thinking about the world dominated by glass panels. Windows become the windows of communication, just like the windows of mobile phones, physically isolated, lonely but closer. However, all of this is filled with calmness and helplessness, making me cherish every moment of life even more. Through this work, I hope to re-examine the ordinary actions of daily life and the changes in the urban environment, while expressing my attention to the intersection of art and life.

Black Car on White Background 2023

Snow is a color, white is a color, snow is a natural, water-crystallized ice, while white is a basic color in color theory. This work began with waiting for snowflakes in the sky, using fluttering snow to depict the portrait of a black car. 8 hours later, the black car was left on the ground, the snow depicting the portrait, leaving a profound impression. Then I used a computer to convert the background of the snow into the white color in the RGB color model's hexadecimal color, usually represented as (255, 255, 255), thus generating a vector graphic portrait of a black car with a white background. As this is a vector graphic, it can be infinitely scaled and spread on the internet. I associate snow and white together to contrast and hope to experience the manufacturing process of the black car and its process of consumption and being consumed in space and time from the perspective of nature. The black car is not only a physical existence, it also represents our relationship with nature, our dependence on nature and our impact on nature.”

Under the Sun 2023

I use sunlight to displace water and body, trying to experience fleeting moments. Although the sun is always there, its effects are often not noticed because it is so routine. The fiery sun is billions of light-years away, and its miraculous existence has never changed. However, I can't watch it directly, I can only look away, face the water as blue as the sky with my back to the sun, and experience how the sun makes me change and deform my shadow. I try to remember my own kelp-like shadow, mysterious and elusive. I can only use video to record the fleeting self, to experience the fusion of lost time and body. Between me and the sun is a lingering awe. I paused at the frequency of sunlight being disrupted by water waves, allowing light and shadow to connect with sight and perception, experiencing how shadows use perception as a medium, and measuring the fusion of surrounding things and inner world. Anyway, it's part of my daily meditation practice.

Lung 2022

I look for unspeakable loss in ordinary things. This loss is the biggest problem in my life and work, and it is also the reason and motivation to do this project.

Fly with the Wind 2022

I often think of the surrealist artist Magritte, the free sky and the white clouds. I closed my eyes and scanned the white cloud above my head, so that the details of my face were the expression of a white cloud and became my avatar. I follow the white clouds between the reality and the surreal, trying to conquer the uncertain boundary between the real and the virtual. I don't know what sentence to use to describe the relationship between my head and the white cloud. Is it about hope and loss? Negotiation and communication between abstract and concretion? or whether shaking my head is a way of thinking? Is it a helplessness to digest the intensity of reality? Anyway, Make the invisible visible, turn around to make wishes come true.

Yellow Line 黄线 2022

This video can be viewed in two ways. You can sit and watch. Or look absent-mindedly, turn around to look at the lively streets around, and return to this video. You still see avatars generated by "traffic yellow lines", reminding us that the body is part of the urban road, an extension of the body. The idea came from my concern with my own shadow on the "yellow line of traffic". Experiencing the impact of the "Yellow Line of Traffic" on my life, allowing the hallucinations to play out on the roads of the city and making me part of the environment. I use my mobile phone to record and make this process, experience the texture of "traffic yellow line" and challenge the abstraction of the body. I hope this video can be my "self-portrait" or everyone's "self-portrait", just to verify the free space that exists between human and artificial.

Stand Still 2022

Turning my back to the sun and facing the ground in front of me has been an exercise in self-healing in my life. I use the camera lens of my mobile phone to keep the composition of the "standard phase" motionless, and to experience the fusion of lost time and still movements, which is the purpose of shooting this work. I want to hold the moment of emptiness and eternity, feel the absolute power of the will shuttle between yin and yang, let the ego dissipate in the medium, in the uncertainty or randomness of existence, in the light and shadow and the breeze. This work is about the interaction of mind and body, not watching images, but projecting oneself into a specific environment, participating in the experience with actions, and finding the secret of existence. Everyone can experience it, without video editing and image processing, as long as there is no real-time recording of technical content, as long as you add yourself to the time span, you can share the shooting behavior. It can be a game or it can be serious, quiet living with passion and plain minimalist. Between self-portrait and landscape painting, there is a continuous dialogue and interaction through light and shadow, narrowing the distance between oneself and art, approaching the ordinary essence with pure form, bringing life into artwork, rather than between gallery space and works unnatural isolation.

Observe Silence 观察沉默 2022

In order to experience flow and pulsation, I wander the streets every day, moving with the flow of people, allowing my mind to walk in and out. In the crowd, I began to ignore the uniqueness of people, pay attention to the ‘shadow’ behind the crowd, and feel the superposition of different identities, different wishes, and different rules. I use my phone to record and magnify the shadows, making them the ‘front’ of life to observe the unexplained silence within. There is something in common about flow and pulsation, but there are 10,000 different meanings, and the purpose of this piece is to try and make them relate to each other. Understand processes and endless concepts through the shading of the plane. It's not about making images, it's not about telling a story, it's about me being in the shadows of the crowd. If I'm not moving toward a solution, but toward a stable, comfortable, unresolved state, and - what happens. The production process behind the work is my life: extracting shadows, confirming the line between virtual and real.

Balance and Straightness 平衡与直线 2021

I like to amplify the control of balance and straight lines by confusing scale and vision. It’s about letting the work exist between the physical control and the imagined control. This is an unnatural behavior against nature，between the non-interference shooting and the subject, hold my breath to keep the straight line in the frame stable. Transform things in reality into pure lines, interconnected through tactile memories. Reduce the ups and downs of fate to flat geometric shapes and stable shooting positions. Isolate the shaking caused by control and after being controlled. Minimize and eliminate the rendering of narratives, experience the subtle boundary between sensibility and material.

Blink 眨眼 2021

The work begins with a tangled transition between inside and outside, trying to create a potentially different self-concept. To experience the inner and outer lines through blinking, to experience the "feeling of seeing oneself" between seeing and being seen, focusing on the way of seeing phenomena and the relationship between the body is a dialogue between perception and the inside. The making process is about the physical cycle between me and my look. I hope to be inside and outside at the same time, without stories or records, just copying the "blink" frame by frame with pictures, magnifying the distance between the image and the subject, or letting the "me" be hidden by the image in front of me. Swing between passive acceptance and active choice, trying to break the line between inside and outside.

Shopping Cart 购物车 2021

I try to use the ‘shopping cart’ to digest changes in the cultural environment, transform unstable living conditions, and make personal space and the public realm more integrated. I hope to use a simple and direct method to make the recording of the video recorder a part of the specific action, experiencing the different realities of the space before and after the camera, and reconfirming the boundaries of recording, behavior, and interaction.

Water Flows in Fish 水在鱼里流 2021

Perhaps it is about contemporary "fragile", "escape", and "imprisoned" life. I started to record my daily life with my mobile phone, paying attention to the overlapping parts of different things that resonated and associated me. My superposition of different things is not to discuss big topics, Nor solve any life problems. It’s like living and working alone. It's not my conscious choice, it’s a natural formation. It’s all things that come to me, and I react to what's in front of me. In the past year, I stayed in the kitchen for a lot of time, and some invisible nothingness hidden in daily life made me continue to question the role of matter. I began to sway in the entanglement between mobile phone pictures and living life, trying to capture the void created by the separation of the image and its material support. I want to create a pause between the differences, without any content, you only need to look in two directions, just like when you cross the road.

Shovel the Snow in the North 在北方铲雪 2020

In the monotonous, tedious, and repetitive habits of life, I am preoccupied with finding the poetic moments that hide their personalization, capturing subtle paradoxes. This work can be my self-portrait and everyone's self-portrait - to find and verify the unique imprinted and unprinted moments in our lives.

We Burn, We Shiver 我们燃烧，我们颤抖 2020

In 2020, I ‘threw myself into’ the nature replaced by pictures, enjoying the scenery as an imaginary whole, and the boundaries between thinking and doing were constantly blurring. Photography has become a second-nature activity , part of every day action. My computer screen became a window, a mirror, a telescope, and a video recorder, allowing me to ‘dig and look’ frame by frame, like an escape from a predicament along a gap. I always weigh the fascinating ‘reflection’ between the outer world and inner thoughts, hoping to present the ‘desire’ that I can't see. But I can see, not the relationship between ‘seeing’ and ‘can't see’ - it is about walking into the superimposed life of ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’. Digital life connects unrelated things, generates new actions, brings new thinking, and is an exciting life. Life will no longer have themes, only results.

Bigger Than Me 比我大 2020

I'm not always interested, and I'm not always disinterested in the iPhone's annual upgrade, like nature is beautiful, but not because of its changing seasons, but because of its changes. This is a piece about the iPhone. The upgrade of technology is not surprising, but the new relationship between things is exciting. The work doesn't care about creativity, just trying to experience putting my hand and mobile phone in one dimension: How to understand the complementary space between mobile phone and hand, not to stop at one and lose the other. iPhone is big, bigger than myself. The iPhone is small, smaller than myself.... The generation of the picture is related to the movement of the mobile phone, so to speak: ‘The work is not art or just art’.

Studio Space 小户型 2020

The work begins with ‘the body is a part of architecture, and architecture is an extension of the body’. Trying to create a visual experience about the relationship between inside and outside, experience the relationship between the way of viewing and the space where the body is located at the same time, let the feeling sway between the perception and the daily details of the architectural space, what the body is surrounded by, and what controls it. The work of hope is an engine that makes real ideas but not objects.

Up to the Standard 达标  2020

Focus on the relationship between natural phenomena of the body and the standardization of man-made systems. It's like an annual physical examination data test. The production of works does not care about the final visual effect, but emphasizes the mutual influence of images and living bodies in the production process, the organic complementarity of individual and modular combination, and the process of quantifying abstract subjects in life. The solemnity people give me… and I need to repay the solemnity. Art is a solemn look at the relationship between material and medium.

Blank Leaf 2020

Let myself experience the rhythm of plant movement, and use animation to imitate the shaking of leaves by the wind. I'm interested in living between man-made and nature.

Non-Biological Components of the Body 2020

Relationship between the body and science and technology is constantly changing, such as medical imaging technology, surveillance technology, various communication technology and so on are affecting our bodies. The work focuses on the body and the blurry boundaries of the technological dichotomy. The body is not only a physical reaction site, but also a digital "battlefield", a controversial social space, a boundary that can be crossed by other institutions and technologies.

Walk in the Cars 在车里走 2020

Practice the effectiveness of ‘masking’ meaning. Making the fragments of existentialism and romanticism work is a challenge to change different perspectives. ‘Extracting the Shadow’ is a poetically exhilarating act of reality that can be achieved through mere shadowing and imagination, another way of thinking about and questioning our place.

Daily sketch series during the Pandemic 2020.

During the Covid-19 pandemic situation, I am isolated at home. I began to sketch the daily fruits and vegetables on sketch paper and blackened them. I don't want to do art in general, just let the actual action such as blackening itself replace the visual illusion and break the imaginary space. I am experience the relationship between area, volume and boundaries. This is an experiment about the constant filling and piling up of thoughts. The accumulation of monotony and machinery is the main content of my daily life. I tried to focus on the everyday face and the real life, blurring the distance between life and art. The line in the sketch is the beginning of all the modeling, as well as the bottom line and foundation of all the actions, such as going out for a walk, a speech and so on. I'm interested in the space between the imagined picture and the concrete action.

At the top of the Tree 2019

I work in the city, sometimes recording the boundaries of different things through cameras and sketches, trying to break the boundaries between art and life or saying that art exists between different things. This prompted me to look for "an elusive quality." Art is helping me to capture as accurately as possible. No matter how I explain its meaning, I have never caught it exactly. I just keep trying to capture it, never interrupted. Doing art makes me closer to thinking "What is the mysterious universe?" I know that "mystery" is a big problem, but it is indeed my motivation.

Video Installation: Long Leaf Grass 2019

My work has to do with space and objects. Special attention is paid to the gap between three-dimensional space and two-dimensional space. There are many objects in my life; whether they exist in virtual space or in physical space, it is important to define the balance of movement and instability of their boundaries. I am drawn to things that are simple and mechanical that make me think about how to make the usual environment and objects have new faces and relationships, the boundaries between the different things develop or persist, and there is the balance of coexisting with each other. Creating this platform to relocate relationships and the location of mutual movement is the opportunity for contemplation and exploration.

Walk Man. 2019

Walking in the sun, I can feel the distance between my body and me, as if entering a mental space, like walking on a plane of different dimensions. I became a shadow on the ground, merging with all the marks on the ground. I swing between public space and private space. Experiencing the overlap

Couple 2018

Distance, hope and questioning hope are the conceptual and emotional focus of my art

Wheelchair 2010

For the Chinese-born artist Le Xi, what draws him to Brattleboro are its different kinds of light. Le Xi’s work, ‘Wheelchair,’ was made on Western Avenue in 2010. It‘s an extraordinarily affecting and challenging mixed-media piece in which the dark shadows of many objects, including a puppy’s tail and crosses, are flashed in staccato bursts onto a black shiny wheelchair and the wall behind it. It’s the only piece that moved [Chief Curator Mara Williams to tears while she talked about it. “This is a proudly beautiful and very disturbing piece,” she said. “We’re dealing with a wheelchair. It’s a very specific chair, not a Windsor chair, and not a rocking chair. There are issues of aging in this piece, of a body that’s fragile and a mind that’s still lively. It’s remembering that you could walk and you don’t want to be confined to the chair, you’re larger than the chair, and you’re struggling against the chair. He said he chose an object from his life — it happened to be a wheelchair — and sat in the front garden one night last summer, studying the different kinds of light. There was bright moonlight coming from overhead, moving light from the headlights of the cars on Route 9, and the electric light of his projector. This is how the piece was born.” – Joyce Marcel, “On the cutting edge of art: ‘In The Zone III’ exhibit at BMAC shows depth of talent in Windham County” The Commons (100) 5/11/2011, p. 3.

Trash Can 2010

The tools used to create my work consist of Flash generated animation, rendered by simple lines, symbolizing the mechanical means by which man marks my creative presence. Projected on common objects, such as a trash can or chair, the animation both becomes part of and comments on, the object. As the object casts a second animated shadow, representing the opposing mystery of the imagination, this interplay of man’s created “reality” and the ever-changing imagination is surrounded by referenced mixed media art pieces.

Le Xi’s website and youtube channel