Project ShanghART WB Central, Shanghai
Fantasmata & Ambrosio's Mnemonic
Artist: Li Hainan
Opening performance: since 15:30, July 13th
Curator: Huang Kui
Co-curator: Zhuang Zexi
Duration: 7/13 - 8/17（Tue–Sun 11am-7pm）
Location: ShanghART WB Central, Bldg 4, No. 288 Ruining Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai
The fourth iteration of Platform Project will present Fantasmata & Ambrosio’s Mnemonic, a solo project by artist Li Hainan at ShanghART WB Central Space. Opening on July 13 and running through August 17, this project stages site-specific versions of Li’s works, transforming the Platform into a paratheatre, an arena that invites audience to co-choreograph a duet for two vacuum cleaners, thereby awakening latent memories of dance, labour, and war.
Fantasmata & Ambrosio’s Mnemonic
The project draws inspiration from the 15th-century dancer Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro (1420–1484), who around 1463 adopted the surname Ambrosio—a reference to the fabled ambrosia that rendered Achilles invulnerable. In the same year, building on his mentor Domenico da Piacenza’s (1390–1470) notion of fantasmata, Guglielmo developed a mnemonic system for dance: practitioners were required to train in the nascent ballet technique of delicate toe-tapping, experiencing the tense posture suspended “as if petrified by Medusa” between steps—trembling, swaying—thus producing a sensory sequence that mapped dance movements in time-space. Guglielmo’s classical mnemonic for dancing soon became, alongside contemporary drawing lessons, an indispensable component of noble household education across the Italian peninsula under the patronage of the Sforza family—a performative code for mastering the choreography of power.
Within the theatricalised Platform, two robots recall this duet, now rich with contemporary metaphors. Atop each vacuum cleaner, a slender metal rod extends into a mannequin’s hand clad in a white glove, posed in La Main de Justice—the righteous hand of sovereign investiture. The robots initially circle the platform’s two golden fortresses in graceful non-interference, occasionally brushing against small golden summoning bells that punctuate their dance with ritualised rhythm. Audiences may watch this spectacle—robots wielding miniature sceptres in mid-air—or intervene by throwing artist-painted figurines into the arena, disrupting or directing the choreographic pattern, diverting or guiding the robots’ collision course along their cleaning path.
For those not yet on the Platform, a pair of white gloves drifts in and out of a split-screen sky projection, grazing a dark drapery that glimmers faintly with the spectral shine of medals of commemoration, labour, and combat. These two installations form a somber stage for the fantasmatic dance—suspended and ruptured in futile stasis: an unnamed sky holds aloft the perpetual warning COMING SOON, while medals stripped from private histories are reassembled by collectors into an arbitrary star cluster. Together they conjure a palpable yet wilfully overlooked absence—an aporetic tremor. Ultimately, all secrets are laid bare in the gaming box installed by the artist at the centre of the platform. Here, he unveils a casket lined in green velvet—while the century’s finest dancers, in vain, risk everything, pirouetting the fantasmatic rhythm on a pinhead, wagering gains and losses with the ruthless precision of the Kelly formula.
About the artist
Li Hainan born in 1993 in Northeast China, visual artist. Graduated from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, DNAP (BFA) and DNSAP (MFA), France, currently resides in ShangHai. Relying on a variety of media such as installation and sculpture, Li Hainan intervenes and reconstructs images through a visually dominant artistic language, developing a critical and diverse social practice of political art. He is committed to deconstructing the 'truths' anchored and constructed in historical narratives with a new paradigm, attempting to knock down the framework of commonplace ideas through the strangeness of value anchors, thereby revealing the structural relationship between social territories and the economy under the wave of capital, and thus constructing artistic intuitions into new realities.
His recent exhibitions include: ‘Z Generation of Third Culture: Interculture Child’, Soul Art, BeiJing, CN; ‘Plasmodesmata’, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, CN (2025); ‘Dreamland · Homeland’, Festival Croisements 60, Winland Center, HangZhou, CN (2024); ‘Porthole’, Art Shenzhen x SWCAC, Shenzhen, CN (2024); ‘Coming Soon’, solo project, Tank ShangHai, Shanghai, CN (2024); ‘OuT10JQKA’, solo project, AVG Space, Chengdu, CN (2023). Selected for residencies at AVG Space (Van Gogh House Foundation, London), Sichuan Fine Arts Institute Art Museum, etc. Nominated for UCCA Young Associates Choice Awards 2024 Shortlis.
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