How performance artist Li Liao, famous for his 45-day stint on Foxconn’s assembly lines in 2012, became a delivery driver to pay the bills
On a Sunday morning at Shenzhen’s Pingshan Art Museum, one unimpressed visitor in shiny leather shoes drags away her young child as the boy waves at a selfie video of performance artist Li Liao, dressed in the yellow uniform of a food delivery driver. “What on earth are we looking at here? It’s not even high-end,” the mother complains.
The next day, Li throws his head back and laughs into the lofty ceiling of the coffee shop where TWOC relates this scene to him. “Very good. I’m afraid of becoming a high-end artist,” he says. In 2022, when his wife Yang Jun, the family’s breadwinner, quit her job to start a fashion business, 40-year-old Li looked at the two or three decades of mortgage payments remaining on their new apartment in Shenzhen’s Nanshan district, and signed up to be a driver with Meituan, the largest food delivery platform in China.
After six months of struggling in his new job, Li drove his delivery scooter into the museum this March and parked it there in the middle of his new solo exhibition, “The Wife Went to Start a Business.” Dizzying screenshots of payments and rankings Li received from the Meituan app are pinned on the gallery walls. Elsewhere the exhibition consists of photos, videos, and installations highlighting the distress and triviality that emerged through this experience: a photograph of an arm with a stark tan line stretching across Shenzhen’s skyline; a visceral sculpture of a leg suspended in air with its knee hitting a road block, commemorating an accident Yang suffered on the back of Li’s scooter; the sound of Li humming a breezy song to various views of the road, mixing with the repeated “excuse me” he utters on the crowded sidewalks in another video to the right.
When Art Meets the Authenticity of Labor is a story from our issue, “After the Factory.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine. Alternatively, you can purchase the digital version from the App Store.
Siyi is the former Culture Editor at The World of Chinese. She writes about arts, culture, and society, and is ever-curious about the minds, hearts, and souls inside all of these spheres. She is now a freelance writer with additional work experience in independent filmmaking and the field of education.
