Lemkus Gallery
16.05 - 06.06.2025

Beauty or propaganda? Sublime or banal?  Screen-invoked awe. 

Alluding to William Butler Yeats’ 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’, Yolanda Li’s exhibition draws on a notion of collapse – biblical, ecological, political – to examine how the sublime abounds, turning and turning, in contemporary visual culture, as a tool of emotional manipulation – transforming something almost sacred into something numbing. This sublime is not calling for the return to nature as spiritual transcendence, as the Romantics once considered the engagement with the sublime to inspire. Instead, the sublime, as we know it today, is constructed and delivered through Photoshop, 4K screens and crisis content. We see this in Li’s exhibition in the form of a visual language consisting of endless green fields, big blue skies, cloudy and vast mountain ranges, forests and even the typography of the exhibition’s name on the wall, curling like a gust of wind or a crushing wave. What was once threatening because of its vastness and power beyond human capacity is now crunched into the capitalist machine.

Li’s earlier work explored simulacra: images that do not refer to anything “real,”- images of images of images. Now, she explores the effect of such images. She asks: What does it mean to be visually overwhelmed in a way that makes one passive instead of active? To view, for example, video depictions of epic landscapes that are recognisable as screensavers.

In this exhibition, Li transforms the gallery into a retail space. Clean surfaces, stylised fonts, and pristine lighting evoke the cool sterility of a tech storefront. But the dread-tinged content of processed nature offers moments that break the illusion we are so used to living in. The room reflects a colour palate of pale blue, grey, green and white – a neutral, sanitised room save for the occasional fleck of unsettling red.

Among the nine installations, four video installations stand out.

Firstly, Flag is a video work that, for 2 minutes and 36 seconds, sees Li inhabiting a landscape alluding to Charles O’Rear’s photograph “Bliss” (1996), the iconic image of blue sky and green grass, used by Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system.  She wears a grey suit and plants a flag in the middle of the screen. By planting a flag in this highly recognisable scene, she parallels the imperial gesture and calls into question the nationalist spectacle. The brevity of the video echoes the looping style of short-form content.

In House Li builds a small house around herself on a warehouse floor. The materials of the house are card print-outs of the blue sky and green grass image. Inside the house, she begins to eat a slice of cake bearing the same image but revealing a striking red once she cuts into it. The use of stock images points to how even intimate and personal spaces are constructed from simulation; our dreams, our imaginaries and increasingly, our livelihoods, built from repeatable images. Eating is a nod to our consumption of visual media. We are not just within it; it is also within us. The red perhaps points to something repressed, our desires or a violence in the media itself.

Screen savers and a song is the longest video in the exhibition. In it, Li is seated facing a large curtain, her back to the viewer. The room is grey and set up for a single viewer to view the curtain. On the curtain are projections of screensavers of snowy mountain ranges, forests, flowers and skies. Occasionally, text fills the screen: “may your tears flee with yesterday”, “you’re on the verge of drowning”. In front of the projection, in the gallery space, are two cushions, curated for viewers to sit and ultimately mimic Li on screen. The depicted space is meditative and vaguely corporate, like a waiting room in heaven. The text nods to self-help aesthetics. Coupled with sublime, natural imagery, both text and visuals should galvanise the viewer, but seem to have the opposite effect of pacifying, almost disciplining. The text is from the song “Tomorrow Will Be Better”, written by Lo Ta-yu and released in 1985 as part of the fundraiser “World Vision International.” The song falls into the genre of Taiwanese Mandopop and was inspired by the American public service song “We Are the World”.

Clouds over mountain depicts a constantly moving visual of water-like clouds shifting over a hard mountain surface. The visual is grey and dull blue, and the nature of the motion looks like static. Words flow over the mountain too: “I feel you”, “so far when you look at me”, “look at me for a while”. Resembling a glitchy stock screen saver, but carrying language of closeness, the video reflects the notion of real feeling with no place to land, no source or consequence, ambient, impotent.

Each work in the exhibition is both enticing and unnerving. You want to look closer, but the closer you get, the more you feel that you are being sold something—intimacy, fear, nationalism, even a politicized ecological guilt. Emotion commodified.

Significantly, Li refuses to exempt herself. Rather than position herself as the radical outsider, she implicates her own aesthetic choices in the systems she critiques, paralleling her act of inserting herself into her videos. Part of the brilliance lies in how clean and cohesive the exhibition is. This is not work that rejects legibility—it co-opts it. The sublime rendered market-ready. It’s unsettling because it works. 

In the South African context where natural beauty exists alongside structural violence and where identity politics are often aestheticized, Li’s work is deeply relevant. It reminds us that to feel moved is not the same as being changed. And that often, the most dangerous images are the ones that make us feel something and ask nothing in return.

Ultimately, the room itself is a simulacrum- a reference to the world we inhabit and a revelation of its unreality and virtuality. To recognise it as a simulacrum is to glimpse, if only briefly, the extent to which our world has become so thoroughly simulated that ‘the real’ is revealed only in the awareness of its absence. Only in this moment, we stop turning, and remember the field, the sky – what once was known directly. In this moment, art, once dismissed by Plato, in early aesthetic discourse, as mere imitation, becomes, paradoxically, more real than life itself.