HKDI Gallery

450cm×120cm

Plaster of Paris sculpture

2010

In giant form, we encounter Lili separated into her composite parts. This reinforces the obvious: that Lili is not real. But, besides its beauty, it might suggest a further interpretation also. Namely that the body – the precincts of our human bodies, with their clearly defined boundaries - perhaps prevent us from sensing our limitlessness. When pondering the space between Collapsed Lili’s parts, we might feel ourselves reminded of what we are.

The installation series "Timeless Time" consisted of six sets of independent costumes inspired by time and space. This series combined the mysterious charm of the ancient orient, abstract artistic expression and interpretation of the historical processes and gradual changes through time. The masked face suggests Tim Yip's imagination of and hope for the future: that people who live under the veil will be able to return to China's traditional culture.

Crouching Tiger,Hidden Dragon,1999, Movie, Yu Xiulian

Set in the Qing Dynasty during the 43rd year of the Qianlong Emperor, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is based on the fourth novel in the Crane Iron Pentalogy, by Wuxia novelist Wang Dulu. Tim Yip won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction and the British Academy of Film and Television Award for Best Costume Design.     

SWAROVSKI  ON STAGE & SCREEN

Shaping, a gothic corseted dress embellished with over 100,000 crystals in black and grey hues, which glints with a dark beauty. For more than 85 years, Swarovski crystals have commanded a starring role in some of cinema’s most memorable productions. Working hand in hand with the stars as well as the costume and set designers who bring screen dramas to life, Swarovski has provided generations of movie-makers with precision-cut crystals that can bring a magical quality to any scene.

Magazines record reality, but also create another, virtual world. As time goes by, this virtual space is renewed and replaced in apparently endless change. Faces that had appeared on the covers of magazines become blurred in people's memory. Yip has substituted these anonymous faces with that of Lili in his photomontage artwork Outdate Magazines, stirring a faint yet inexhaustible feeling of recollection.

Lili began as naked bronze statue labelled Desire. She wept tears of real water. Then she became more humanlike, with human skin-tone and articulated joints. She became Lili. Lili resembles a stereotypical sixteen-year-old Chinese woman. She nearly always wears dark glasses and has a variety of wigs and costumes. Lili is created from Tim’s memories. Her story has been developed from the imagination of a future world where all human beings are gone and only artificial environments remain. The future is full of human memories, which Lili visits.

Not only a traveller in this strange territory, Lili is faithfully present throughout Tim’s various working excursions across Europe, China. Her expression, though on the one hand fixed in its state, is indeed completely flexible. In physical reality, she is a manikin, yet she occupies a psychological space into which one can project from the deeper recesses of one’s own memory. She is a mirror, a cypher, a device, an inhabitant on the borderline with another dimension.

Unveiled at Hong Kong Design Institute is the next frontier in Lili’s evolution.

Robot Lili is Yip’s meditation on Artificial Intelligence (AI). For Lili, a simple wigged manikin in a state of constant change who sheds one costume and then adopts another, the robotic form may offer her a key to a further transformation. There is a possibility in the realm of the imagination that AI may create new bodies for our ‘spiritual DNA’ or the collective memory, that allow us to shuttle between different layers of time and space, connecting us to strata of the Universe as yet unperceived.