Photographer and Artist
Chinese (Fushun)
Based in Fushun, Li Yong lives and works within a city often defined—within dominant discourses—as situated along a linear timeline of modernity shaped by the rise and gradual decline of energy extraction. While such extraction implies depletion and breakdown, Li instead perceives a latent re-aggregation of energy within the very ruins it has left behind. These energies, generated in what Li calls “ruin time,” emerge as a vital force—a convergence of human, non-human, and land-based entanglements. In the pauses and absences of external forces that once drove modernization, “ruin time” reveals itself. For years, Li has remained embedded in these ruinous landscapes, using photography, as well as video, writing, and installation, to sense and engage with these hidden energies.
