This interview is conducted by Jiete Li in September, 2022. Jiete Li is a curator based in China. She founded the non-profit organization Banying 半影 (or In Light of Shadows) which aims to empower women in China through the arts. She used to be a curatorial researcher at the National Gallery of Art and National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. She graduated with a BA and MA in art history from Smith College and New York University respectively.
The interview consists of four parts:
Part I. Good art has a kind of foresight
Part II. I want to speak out women's most real, private, and painful experiences
Part III. I am a feminist, I am not afraid of being stigmatized
Part IV. The cyborg world allows us to reimagine gender relations
Li Xinmo, The Death of Xinkai River, 2008, performance
Jiete Li: Your early works echo current social events across time and space. The work entitled I Want to Breathe made in 2006 reminds me of the Black Lives Matter slogan "I can't breathe" in 2020, while the 2008 series Memories of Vagina shows a chain stuffed into a woman's vagina, which reminds me of the Xuzhou chained woman incident (Chinese: 徐州铁链女事件) reported in 2022. People say that good art can predict the future. What do you think?
Li Xinmo: When I look back at my works, I am often surprised, because indeed, some of the works I had made before happened later. I Want to Breathe was made in 2006. It films a miner with silicosis coughing continuously before dying. It is about human rights, but also about life-and-death. The last thing those miners were deprived of was the right to breathe.
In 2015, smog broke out in China, especially in Beijing. When the smog blanketed the sky, breathing became a huge problem. Inhaling the air full of smog is equivalent to inhaling poisonous gas, and breathing normally became a luxury. When people went out, some of them put on gas masks, and I had to install an air purifier at home. However no matter what, people always had to go out, and children had to go to school. Every time I saw a young child wearing a mask to school, I felt an unspeakable pain. The smog in 2015 also reminded me of the 2006 work I Want to Breathe. The Black Lives Matter movement you mentioned, I also paid attention to it. When breathing is threatened, life is threatened. Breathing is the basic right to life, and deprivation of the right to breathe means deprivation of the right to live.
Li Xinmo, I Want to Breathe, 2006, video
Jiete Li: You also mentioned Memories of Vagina. In the series, one work shows iron chains being stuffed into a vagina.
Li Xinmo: I noticed its connection with the Xuzhou incident while sorting out my works recently. When making this series, I thought about women’s experiences and the cultural, historical, and visual memories related to vagina. Among them are memories of female abortion and delivery pain: surgical scissors and instruments inserted into vagina, and memories of sexual violence: knives and guns inserted into vagina. Inserting chains with locks into vagina is a visual representation of chastity belts, chastity locks, and female circumcision. Women are tied to sex and reproduction, which are women's main identity and function in a patriarchal society. In our long history, women have had no subjectivity of their own, nor independent personality, and acted just as reproductive tools in the patriarchal society. All kinds of control and possession of women can be attributed to the control, possession, and deprivation of women's bodies, sex, and vagina. The recent Xuzhou chained woman incident is not an isolated incident, but the fate of countless women. The deep-rooted patriarchal thought is the root cause of these incidents. Poverty and ignorance aggravate this patriarchal ideology. Women have lived as commodities, tools for procreation, and a materialized existence. Putting a woman on a leash to give birth to eight children seems impossible in the 21st century, but it happened. While making Memories of Vagina and choosing those symbols that represent violence, I did not actually expect that the chained woman incident would happen in 2022, but my work did have a connection with the present, like a kind of prophecy. 
Li Xinmo, Memories of Vagina, 2008, photography
Some of my other works also predict the future. Works from many years ago are now happening in our society. In my solo exhibition Repulsion in 2015 Germany, I created a performance installation called Isolation: animal bones, earth, a dying person lying on the hospital bed in animal blood. It depicts the degradation of the natural world under global capitalization, man's deprivation of nature, land, and the animal world, and finally placing himself in a state of destruction. It's like a portrait of the world we live in today. Since 2020, "isolation" has become one of the most familiar words, but in 2015, people's imagination of isolation was limited to historical racial segregation. Now "isolation" has become our reality. The plague as a distant memory seems to have become history, but history made plague to reoccur in this era of highly developed technology and medicine. The means of epidemic prevention are almost the same as a hundred years ago, which is isolation.
Li Xinmo, Isolation, 2015, performance installation
The pandemic fueled more and more racial and ethnic hatred and exclusion. The open and inclusive world that people have tried to build is so fragile that it begins to crumble in the face of the pandemic. At the same time there is the expansion of authoritarian politics. Among them is Afghanistan, which is once again ruled by the Taliban. I made a light installation in 2015 about Islamic women covered in black veils, which also seems to be a prophecy for women now enslaved again by the Taliban.
Indeed as you can see, some of my works foresee the future, which may be derived from me exploring the universal human experiences and social issues. To some extent, these works reveal issues shared by all human.
Jiete Li: Years have passed, and yet the same social problems continue to arise. In every corner of the world, the oppressed and exploited always exist. As an artist, what can you do for them? What role can art play in social issues?
Li Xinmo: Inequality is a long-standing social problem and the cause of many social incidents. It is difficult to get solved, which will continue to be so. In unequal relationships, there is definitely oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited. This kind of relationship exists between genders as well. Feminism is trying to change this unequal social structure and lift gender oppression imposed by the patriarchal system.
An important direction of contemporary art is social intervention. Joseph Beuys' idea of "social sculpture" has influenced many artists, including me. I am also influenced by Hans Haacke. He closely combined art with social politics and used art to raise sharp questions. There are also other artists who truly practiced the concept of social intervention, allowing art to take place in real social scenes, such as participating in protests in an artistic way, for example Guerrilla Girls in the United States who performed their art in protests. However, art cannot directly help others like social workers or human rights lawyers. Art still needs to be expressed in certain forms and methods, so it is more about asking questions, presenting questions, and reshaping the public's awareness through artistic and visual expressions.
Guerrilla Girls, Benvenuti alla biennale femminista! from the series Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: Portfolio 2, 2005, poster, photo credit: National Museum of Women in the Arts
Art does not changes society directly, but indirectly. First of all, it changes people's awareness. In fact, when people's awareness changes, the society also changes. I had also been troubled by your question, that is, I often find art powerless in the face of a cruel reality. But with the passage of time, my thinking changed. Now I know art has its special meaning and function, among which the most important one is that it affects the human spirit. Good art can make you think, touch your heart, and thus open up one’s knowledge, expand one’s thinking, and cultivate inner empathy. These are so significant to one’s spiritual world. Because the society is made up of individuals, when an individual's spiritual world is improved, the whole society will be improved. So art changes society by changing people's spirit.
When it comes to the role that art plays in society, it is like a spiritual healer soothing and healing the human soul, like an observer looking into the world deeply, like a discoverer constantly uncovering the truth and essence of things, like a messenger sending out the power of love. Art opens up different perspectives for people to see the world, provides various ways of thinking and understanding, and creates a space for spiritual healing and rest.
Jiete Li: Self-Portrait made of menstrual blood depicts people without skin; no skin means no protective layers, ready to feel great pain at any time. You said, this is your spiritual portrait, and also many women’s collective portrait. Pain is very important in your works. The Death of Xinkai River, A Ritual of Farewell, Rape... all are works full of extreme pain. How could you endure the pain and stench during the performances? Why do you choose to face pain and sorrow head on over and over again, even if this kind of sorrow makes you cry every time you look back?
Li Xinmo: Many of my works are related to personal experiences. My early life is filled with painful and sad memories. From a very young age, I experienced family misfortune: alcoholism and domestic violence. Childhood became a nightmare that I could never get out of. The nightmare had continued until I entered college and after my father disappeared. The stigma of my family affected my later life. Sexual assault, miscarriage, birth control, betrayal..., these experiences filled my adult life. What I experienced was pain again and again, from physical pain to mental pain. When I started making contemporary art, especially performance art, these experiences came together and became my source of inspiration. Every time I performed, those deep-seated desperation and self-destructive desires were called out, and every time I acted as if in a state of near-death. I felt no self, no pain, no danger.
I also often think about why I make such art. Whenever I look back at these works, I cry and cannot stand watching them. In every performance, the audience was shocked and moved, and many shed tears. Every performance drained all my strength and energy, so there was often a sense of exhaustion at the end which took me a long time to recover. The emotions I put into my works are real, the pain is real, so people feel it. After every performance, I felt a sense of release, as if something about the past that had been holding me finally let go. It seems that through performance art, I can say goodbye to my former self again and again. During this process, the trauma seems to be gradually healed.
Li Xinmo, Human-shaped Prison, 2017, performance
Stench and pain often appear in my performance art. While doing performances, while entering that state of despair, the place of death, I do not actually feel the stench or pain. Maybe only these strong things can make the pain in my heart get some relief.
I have been walking to the depths of the spirit. In the depths of the inner world, I feel pain, despair, and the awareness of death. At the same time, I know that in the depths of the spiritual world, people's emotions are connected. For example, the experiences of sadness and pain are universal to human beings, and as a woman, I know better what pain women experience while growing up, because I have experienced it all.
Therefore, although I express individual experiences and feelings in my art, they are shared by all people, especially women. I believe that human beings are one; I believe I am one with everything. This belief has always influenced me. I guess that is why people cry when they see my work.
Jiete Li: Is art-making a form of healing? When pain is fully presented in front of the audience, is it a kind of letting go?
Li Xinmo: Art is indeed a healing process for me. The imagery of death keeps appearing in my work. In The Death of Xinkai River, I presented a scene of dying in water. When walking into the river that symbolized death, I seemed to experience a death. When I look at the photos of these performances, my death is objectified, and I become the other watching my death, analyzing and even pondering upon my death. During this process, I do feel that my obsession with death gradually reduces, and that I leave death gradually.
Childhood trauma is difficult to erase, which will not disappear with time. Those traumatic memories keep coming back in my adulthood. They became subconscious, appearing in my dreams, and are constantly remembered. If this kind of pain and feelings of death are buried in my heart, they will become deeper and deeper. Only by exposing and facing them directly, can I heal them. Art, especially performance art, has become an outlet. I can express the unspeakable in my art.
A Ritual of Farewell presents my state of living at the time. When I laid in freezing water and experienced an extreme state of near death, I did find some kind of release.
Nowhere to Say Goodbye is also a work about my childhood memories. I tore a family photo from my childhood into pieces, had the pieces buried by workers in 12 grave-like mounds, and then dug through the mounds one by one looking for the pieces and finally putting the pieces back together. I scraped open the mounds like opening graves. The process of searching was full of hardships. I almost exhausted all my physical strength to dig up the soil and search for those small fragments. While performing this work, I kept crying, crying bitterly. After finishing the work, I laid in bed for seven days with pain all over my body. But after I finished, I really felt that those childhood nightmares seemed to have left me.
Jiete Li: The work Relationship was inspired by a comfort woman's story: When she was arrested and taken away as a comfort woman during the World War II, the men in her family (her father and brother) just stood by and watched. Later, she managed to escape back home, but got persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. It was the woman who suffered, who bore all the blame, and yet who was innocent. You did not experience the World War II or the Cultural Revolution, why do you have such a strong empathy for the comfort woman? Some people say that the Mao era has passed, are these stories still relevant to young women in today’s China? Are woman worldwide still going through similar predicaments?
Li Xinmo: I think the biggest trait an artist has is empathy. Even though some things happened to others rather than myself, I can empathize with them. Although I did not experience the Cultural Revolution or World War II, I read a lot about these periods, including oral histories. I can feel the life experiences of those individuals through words. Maybe I have a more sensitive and powerful perception, and can actually experience other people's feelings, especially pain.
I read a lot about comfort women. What happened to them was so tragic that it shocked my heart tremendously. I always wanted to make a work related to their experiences. On the train to participate in the Guangzhou Live Art Festival, I read a comfort woman's dictation. The article made my heart ache so much that I could not let it go. So I decided to make a work related to comfort women, which is the performance Relationship Series III: Bed.
Indeed, World War II and the Mao era have become history, but history needs to be remembered. This work is more about recording women's fate during a certain period. I hope to preserve that period of history in an artistic way, so that people will remember them instead of forgetting. There are no comfort women anymore, but sexual exploitation and slavery of women still exist. Women trafficking and rape are still prevalent. On the dark web, women are clearly priced, and in impoverished mountain villages, abducted women are locked up as sex slaves. The history of patriarchal society is also the history of women being enslaved and raped; this history is still going on.
Jiete Li: The word "feminism" is seriously stigmatized in China. You also said that people may get abused if they talk about women's rights on the Internet. In China, if you say you are a feminist, you would be marginalized, and no one would include you in exhibitions. If someone questions "feminism", how would you explain the real meaning of feminism to them? What gives you the courage to keep calling yourself a feminist in public?
Li Xinmo: When I think back on my life, I realize that going into feminism is inevitable. When I was young, I saw my father's violence and my mother's sufferance. At the time, I secretly made up my mind that I would not live like my mother when I grew up. I once persuaded my mother to divorce, and saw her rebel by running away from home, although it failed in the end. My childhood experience made me full of rebellious spirit. Independence and freedom became my most important beliefs. I went through two failed romances (one controlled and one cheated on), and am a single mother. When I encountered all this, I thought that my fate was not good, and often wondered if there was something wrong with me. However, when I came into contact with, read, and understood feminist ideas, I realized what I went through was not just an individual's experience, but many women’s. Many women have had the same experiences as mine. It is just I did not notice them before.
When searching for women-related issues on the Internet, I realized how common they are, including child rape, domestic violence, sexual exploitation, sexual cheating, teenage abortion, etc. Only then did I understand that women's misfortune is not due to personal fate, but the structural oppression caused by the entire patriarchal society, which is a problem of the whole society. And this problem has a long history. From ancient times to the present, it has never been solved. Now it seems that women's situation has improved than before. For example, women can receive education and participate in social and cultural activities nowadays, but the patriarchal culture formed for thousands of years has not been shaken. The existing discipline and shaping of women have not changed much.
I researched feminist theories while making art and writing about feminism at the same time. During this process, I found that a huge change has taken place in myself. First of all, I gradually established a feminist and sociological way of thinking and observing the world. I began to move from the personal world to caring for the society, others, and all women. I became stronger and more determined inside. Feminism taught me the spirit of independence. I was also liberated from the culturally-shaped patterns of framing myself in terms of male approval or heterosexual marriage. I am also more clear, objective, and rational about my past experiences. My world has been completely transformed by feminism, so I am grateful for the history of feminist thoughts. Because feminism has helped my spiritual world, I hope to spread feminist ideas and help more women understand themselves and the society they live in. This is why I continue to express feminism in my art, and advocate women's rights in public spaces. Of course, being regarded as a heresy, being rejected and stigmatized also caused me great mental pressure and distress, but I still insist on saying and doing this. The most important reason is that I firmly believe what I do is right. During this process, I also met fellow feminists. They are activists, theorists, and curators. Their support for me is also an important reason why I am here today. Also the audiences who see my works, their responses give me great motivation. And the young people who saw my work on the Internet, they wrote me letters, conducted interviews, and did research, all of which give me great encouragement.
Jiete Li: Art is often expected to be beautiful, just as women are expected to be beautiful. However your work is not so concerned with beauty, but with an aesthetic of violence and aggression, which may seem sharp, stinging, and disturbing. Why did you choose this expression? How do you respond when your art is questioned as disagreeable or too much?
Li Xinmo: From the perspective of art history, aesthetics of the classical period pursue a harmonious, curvilinear, and elegant beauty, which is brought to an extreme in paintings of the female body. Like most of the nude women paintings displayed at the Louvre, beautiful female bodies are prevalent in art history, which are products of the male gaze. Women are painted just like how still life and vases are painted. In these paintings, the male gaze is projected on the female body; women are solidified and framed by stereotypes, such as purity, grace, and sexiness. However, women's real living experiences are obscured. Feminist art is a rebellion against and rejection to beauty defined by the male gaze. Feminist artists express real women's voices based on their own experiences. So since the emergence of feminist art, we have seen how previous aesthetics defined by the male gaze got broken and became a symbol of vulgarity. The aesthetics of classical realism have already withdrawn from the stage of art history, especially after the emergence of contemporary art. Art no longer uses beauty as a standard. In fact, even before contemporary art, during the period of modernism after Cézanne, art such as expressionism has already abandoned the pursuit of beauty, but developed in the direction of “anti-beauty" or even "aesthetics of ugliness", such as Edvard Munch, Willem de Kooning, etc.
When I started creating, I entered from contemporary art and was influenced by feminist art. So my works no longer pursue beauty, but oppose aesthetics in the traditional sense. I want my works to be real and powerful, to shock or resonate with people's heart. Also because of my continuous focus on death, pain, violence, and the pursuit of an ultimate, my works often present something disturbing, stinging, and sharp. These cannot create aesthetic pleasure, but shock and thinking. This is what I want. In terms of my physical appearance, I do not look particularly flamboyant, and even a little weak, so I need something strong to destroy my weakness, which is what I have always shown in my performance art.
My works, especially the early ones, are quite violent, such as Memories of Vagina, Statement of Scars, Self-Portraits made of menstrual blood... Violence, bodies, sexual organs, menstrual blood…, these things rejected by traditional Chinese culture and the public’s aesthetics can indeed cause people's attack and discomfort. Some people say my works are too direct; some people say they are too extreme. Usually I do not pay attention to these comments, because I know what I am doing and the meaning of my works. I study art theory while creating, so I can interpret my works very clearly, and know what truth the works try to reveal. Although sometimes I feel vulnerable, I have come along, and these works are still meaningful.
Jiete Li: Your depiction of the vagina reminds me of Gustave Courbet's famous oil painting The Origin of the World. Have you been influenced by Courbet? What is the difference between the male and female gaze at a vagina?
Li Xinmo: When I started painting with menstrual blood, I did not know about Courbet's work. I used a very direct approach to depict the female vagina. I drew pubic hair as grass and rivers of water flowing from the vagina. This work shows a connection between women and nature. The female body becomes a part of the earth. It is the place of growth, while nature also transforms life in such a way.
Jiete Li: Your latest work adopts the most trendy form of digital art, exploring the relationship between man and machine, man and technology. What story is this series telling? Does it have anything to do with the patriarchal social structure?
Li Xinmo: The Daydream series is an artistic experiment I have started since 2013. Initially I drew on paper during my residency in Germany. In these drawings, I combined human (females), animals, plants, mythological and imaginative elements. Looking back at these images, I feel that I have created some new species unconsciously. They carry some kind of transcendent power with a mysterious and terrifying aura. In the process of making these works, I tried to empty myself as much as possible and let the subconscious mind work. Those images seem to have come from another time and space; they came into this world simply with the help of my hand. As I understand it, a human being is the process of a soul entering a body. While drawing, I also felt that I was giving shape to some hidden souls. I built their bodies with a pencil, and when they were outlined, they came to life. When I look at the figures in these drawings, I feel that they are real, and can see their souls.
In 2015, I came into contact with the computer vision program Deepdream. I finished the Daydream series in 2017, and then uploaded the images to Deepdream. After reinterpretation by artificial intelligence, new images were generated. Unexpected results came out, as artificial intelligence recreated the hand-drawn images. These images are given a sense of the future. They have exotic colors and rich textures, as well as intricate details that cannot be achieved by hands. Until this time, the creation of these life forms seems to have been completed.
I have been making this series. I have this expectation, hoping that these virtual life forms will one day become a new life form in our world. In 2022, I reprocessed these images to let them move in virtual reality. They began to speak, making a peculiar sound. They are telling a secret, an untold story. I titled this series Rebirth. Coincidentally, these works touched on the concept of "post-humanism". These figures are completed by the combination of human and artificial intelligence. They are complex figures that do not exist in human society. They exist in the virtual world, who seem to show some important characteristics of post-humanity.
When I started making these works, I was more concerned with the concept of artificial intelligence. However, when looking at them from a feminist perspective, I realize that I created a new mythical image of future women. These works take women as the main subject, but are completely different from the previous ones. Their identities are unclear, with half-human and half-god features, and at the same time, they have an aura of the future. Later I associated these works with "cyborg feminism".
In her well-known book, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (published 1985), Donna Haraway envisions a cyborg world. As she conceives, cyborg takes the initiative to end women's fear, anxiety, and loneliness, because in a cyborg society, the distinction between men and women is no longer meaningful, and the boundaries between men and women become blurred. Women are no longer the bodies giving birth. Fertility can be realized through information exchange or artificial cultivation. Women who are separated from the reproductive function are thus separated from the control of the existing social structure and narrative.
Cyborg shows us a different way of living, which breaks the boundaries between living things and non-living things, people and machines, material and non-material. This also means that the anthropocentric world established since ancient Greece, the dualistic structure begins to disintegrate. People whose existence is defined by body and consciousness will gradually disappear, and at the same time, the concept of gender will also disintegrate.