Yicong Li

The interdisciplinary Chinese artist Yicong Li combines fashion, fiber, and performance, creating wearable sculptures through meticulous knitting and crochet techniques that gracefully interact with and alter the human form. Often manifesting as elaborately crafted masks, helmets, or headdresses, her work draws inspiration from the Chinese tradition of Nuo Opera, where villagers wear masks, become mythological deities, and perform prayers for happiness and prosperity to complete the ritual. The mask becomes a threshold: between the real and the mythical, between person and presence. But Li does not seek to resurrect deities. Her figures are not divine. They are vulnerable, covered in soft skins, tentative feelers, loops and knots that don’t hide so much as cradle. If Nuo Opera once summoned gods to protect the village, Li’s sculptures offer something closer to companionship—forms to hold the fragile states we pass through: sorrow, joy, exhaustion, longing. All of them.

There’s a silence to Yicong Li’s work, but it’s not one of emptiness. It hums. It breathes. The way wool and mohair hold warmth seems to echo the energy her hands have put into them. There is no clear border between sculpture and body here, between making and becoming. She builds slowly, with the patience of someone who knows that the important things in life are often quiet and take time. Her practice is stitched from repetition, intuition, and care—each movement of yarn through the hand is a kind of listening. To thread. To self. To the flickering inner life of the people who will one day wear what she makes. At the heart of her work is a longing for transformation—not dramatic metamorphosis, but the slow shifts we make in the dark, the private becoming that happens when no one is watching. A small door quietly opening inward.

Vegetate (2024) is one of those doors. A mask that could be mistaken for a garden mid-bloom, or perhaps a thing in hibernation. Its name carries a contradiction: to vegetate is to grow and to pause. Li leans into that paradox, crafting a form that feels suspended between states. Knitted vines twist and expand, but never fully arrive. The fibers curl like they’re listening for rain. The piece can stand alone or be worn—each option holds a different kind of stillness. Whether it sits or breathes against a human face, Vegetate makes no demand. It simply waits. There is gentleness in that—an invitation to consider that sometimes not moving is its own form of change. In Bound (2023), Li’s focus shifts toward the body, not as an object to be seen, but as a landscape to inhabit. Here, the mask stretches to cover everything. This is no longer just a face disappearing; the entire person is wrapped, woven, cocooned. And yet nothing feels claustrophobic. Bound is immersive, not restrictive. The performer moves inside the sculpture as if it were a second skin, stitched from the artist’s own hands, hours, and rhythms. What could have been armor becomes an embrace. A full-body garment that listens to every motion, following the dancer’s breath, stretch, and recoil.

With Witness (2022–2023), a series of masks asks: what gives a mask its power—the form itself, or the person who wears it? The question feels ancient and new at once. Li turns to the deep sea and plant life for answers, creating faces that pulse with a sense of otherness. These are not masks that mimic the human face, but ones that distort it. Elongated, exaggerated, strange. There is something tender in that strangeness. The wool and mohair suggest both camouflage and comfort, the dual need to be seen and shielded. Witness doesn’t resolve the tension between inner and outer. It simply allows them to coexist, in loops and folds, and tangled strands. Cassiopeia (2025) is perhaps her most lyrical piece—less rooted in tradition, more adrift in the cosmos. Named for both a jellyfish and a constellation, the sculpture glows with contradiction. It sways like it’s underwater but remains anchored by Tiger Eye stones stitched into its surface. Those stones pulse with a quiet gravity, grounding the piece even as it dreams upward. The fibers shift from warm tones to cool ones, like the changing light of stars or a tide slowly turning. When worn, it becomes something else entirely—not a costume, but a lullaby. A way of moving that is more about floating than walking. It is a piece made to be drifted in.

Yicong Li, Vegetate, 2024. Soft sculpture, Merino Wool and Mohair Yarn — variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist.

Yicong Li, Bound, 2023. Soft Sculpture, Interactive Performance

Yicong Li, Witness, 2022-2023. Soft sculpture, Merino Wool and Mohair Yarn — variable dimenions. Courtesy the artist.

Yicong Li, Casseopeia, 2025. Soft sculpture, Merino Wool, Mohair, Tiger Eye Stones, Recycled Fiber Fill — variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist.

Yicong Li, Veil of a Thousand Gazes, 2024. Interactive performance, Cotton yarn — variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist.

Yicong Li, Breeze, 2024. Soft sculpture, Merino Wool and Mohair Yarn — variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist.

Yicong Li, Phase, 2024. Soft sculpture, Merino Wool and Mohair Yarn — variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist.

Yicong Lin, Mind Map, 2024. Soft sculpture, Merino Wool and Mohair Yarn — variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist.

Yicong Li, Connection, 2024. Soft sculpture, Merino Wool and Mohair Yarn — variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist.

Yicong Li, Distance, 2024. Soft sculpture, Merino Wool and Mohair Yarn — variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist.

 

 

If Cassiopeia is about stars, then Veil of a Thousand Gazes (2024) returns to earth—but not quite. There’s a mythic undertow to this piece, inspired by the idea of a goddess whose eyes are everywhere. Made from cotton yarn, it surrounds the body with a lattice of sight. But the gaze here is not invasive. It doesn’t pierce or judge. It observes. It witnesses. There’s protection in being watched by something that doesn’t expect anything in return. When worn, the veil creates a shifting sense of perspective—inside and outside blur, and the wearer is both seen and unseen. Li offers no conclusions, only the experience of existing differently for a while. Breeze (2024) plays in a lighter register. It’s a whisper of a piece—mask and legwarmers—suggesting movement more than declaring it. It is less myth, more breeze on skin. Yet even in its simplicity, there’s something sacred about it. The way wool follows the contours of the body, or how softness can be a kind of strength.

The series Phase (2024) could be called a culmination of everything above, but it doesn’t feel like an endpoint at all. Made during her final year at the Maryland Institute College of Art, it gathers garments, performance, sound, and choreography into one unfolding language. Inspired again by Nuo Opera, Li reinterprets its ritual for a contemporary context—not to summon gods, but to summon fragments of self. The work isn’t linear, but loops and spirals. Identity is not fixed—it is layered, undone, and restitched. And that is exactly the point. Mind Map (2024) makes this inner complexity visible. It spills outward—foam, yarn, fishing line—all reaching beyond the head in abstract shapes. Thoughts made material. The subconscious given form. When worn, it resembles a crown of chaos, but also of communication. Li reminds us that we are never just inside ourselves. That the soft things—grief, joy, confusion—leak. They touch others. They form invisible threads between us. Her sculpture simply makes those threads visible.

Connection (2024) picks up one of those threads and ties it—literally—between two people. Woven as a shared form, it wraps bodies together. Made during the pandemic, it doesn’t scream about crisis or trauma. It whispers of closeness. The warmth of another body near yours. The ache of absence. The hope of touching again. By merging outlines, Li reminds us that our edges are not as solid as we pretend. And therefore we conclude with Distance (2024), which is perhaps the most quietly radical. A soft response to the N95 mask—a symbol of protection, fear, and alienation. Li transforms it into something else. Something soft. Something that doesn’t just keep danger out but invites selfhood in. A private space for becoming. A shield that does not isolate, but frees.

Last Updated on May 15, 2025