Solo Exhibition Absent Gallery,Guangzhou
The 2026 work *The Supreme Object -Ceci est une Pomme de terre Germée* (2026), by contrast, seems like an irony aimed at this symbolic logic. A golden classical frame encloses a glass case; inside the glass case is nested an even smaller golden frame; within these nested layers, a photograph of the gilded potato is placed at the deepest point. Value is not an intrinsic property but the cumulative effect of layer upon layer of packaging. Freud might say this is like the superego’s nested repression of the id. Debord might point out that in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life itself presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles, and everything that was directly lived has been transformed into a representation. Hainan Li materializes this insight as a potato in a frame within a frame, a gilded, cameo-appearing, enshrined "Supreme Object." Its true meaning lies precisely in exposing the full scope of this act of enshrinement.
The gilding of this potato is all the excess value conferred by civilization. Its discontent is perhaps a silent response to this very conferral. From the 2019 street intervention in Paris, to the sealing of the brass sculpture in 2024, to the self-enshrinement in the frame in 2026, Hainan Li’s potato has never left the theater in which it "makes its cameo."
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