Alice Minervini
Fandom is the only kind of 'love' that has real philosophical implications, the passion capable of shaking us out of sensus communis.
K-Punk Blog, Mark Fisher
Starring with a heart-shaped fountain, where fragments of My Chemical Romance concerts and erupting volcanoes YouTube-found snapshots are projected, Forever by Shuang Li opens up multilayered questions on fandom, technological interfaces, and intimacy today. Shuang Li is a transdisciplinary artist interested in questions around embodiment, displacement, and technological interfaces. In her practice, she explores changing experiences of intimacy, with an emphasis on the emotional impacts of internet platforms and digital screens on our bodies. After meeting the guitarist of My Chemical Romance, Frank Iero, Li started to dig into her life-long experiences of fandom and its idiosyncratic gender politics, which increasingly became a prominent question in her practice. Born in the 90s in Wuyi Mountains, and more recently living between New York, Berlin, and China, Shuang Li defines her encounter with the American punk-emo band My Chemical Romance as a life-changing moment during her adolescence. The band’s lyrics resonate with her desire to escape her own body and surroundings, growing up in an isolated industrial town in southeastern China. The installation Heart is a Broken Record (2023) performs a concert that never took place —a montage of clips that crystallises the euphoria of fangirls before seeing their stars. By showing only the galvanising suspension of the prelude of concerts and leaving the encounter open to the imagination, it creates in the viewers a tension similar to fangirls' fantasies and deferred pleasures. The glitching fountain becomes a tribute to the oceanic feeling of being one with lovers' bodies and the altered states of dissolving into dancing crowds, a tribute to the sense of belonging in fandom, simultaneously reclaiming amateur fan-fiction as a production mode. A quintessential adolescent feeling, fandom has historically been marginalised in popular culture for its perceived juvenile, often femme, and immature inclination. Yet, as Shuang Li's exhibition exemplifies, there has been an embrace of fandom in contemporary art discourses and feminist practices. Thus, in an increasingly technology-mediated society, can fandom represent a personal and collective re-orientation and negotiation of our shared realities?
It's interesting to emphasise how fandom, from a sociological point of view, transcends traditional understanding and limitations of personal identity, bringing into being unprecedented communities crossing generations and spatial divisions. In the patriarchal, consumer-oriented societies we are living in, fandom offers a conceptual framework to engage freely in emotional, hyper-feminine behaviour, that otherwise would be restricted and silenced. It represents a pretext to subvert the disciplining of the body imposed on womxn and queer people and indulge in socially unacceptable manners, while manifesting publicly emotions commonly considered as "negative" such as obsession and envy. Disrupting established norms and perceptions, fangirls' heterotopia gives subjects a chance to know themselves in more nuanced ways, deeply affecting their physical selves and realities. In fact, despite late-capitalist consumerism’s attempts to incorporate and commodify its radical potential, fandom still represents a transformative experience that challenges the prescriptive modes of sociality and intimacy within a neoliberal society.
But most of all, as Grant and Random Love argue in their Fandom as Methodology: "for girls, fandom offers a way not only to sublimate romantic and sexual yearnings but to carve out subversive versions of sexuality." (Grant, Catherine, and Kate Random Love. Fandom as Methodology: A Sourcebook for Artists and Writers. Goldsmiths Press, 2019, 6.) The internet and fandom foster alternative ways to express and experience sexuality beyond the capitalist heteronormative regulations based on social reproduction. Almost dematerializing desire and sexuality into atmospheric forces that pervade everything, internet fan-fiction arguably expands the vision of what love might look like. Fangirls' fantasy and identity experimentalism allow marginalised communities to find glitches of intimacy and pleasure, not limited to heteronormative sexual intercourse, dismantling the binary logic of phallogocentrism. As Fisher claims in his K-Punk blogs, his commentary on underground music, politics, and digital cultures, which can be considered an act of fandom in itself, fandom is "the only kind of 'love' that has real philosophical implications, the passion capable of shaking us out of sensus communis." By fostering an alternative set of values and self-composed realities and connecting different people across geographies, generations, and communities, fangirls bring into being an alternative conception of "affects" and "love" completely opposed to the neoliberal commodification of online interactions. A counter-reality that arguably operates a shift in the meaning of love, from an action aimed at beloved ones to the subject itself.
In a similar way, the exhibition Forever creates an intimate and nostalgic space; entering the exhibition at Peres Projects in Milan, visitors have the feeling of stepping into someone's room or getting glimpses of someone through a recollection of their iPhone gallery or Instagram feed. It's interesting to analyse how fandom is both a topic present in Shuang Li's works and simultaneously a methodology entailed by the artist. In fact, the multimedia installations, spanning sculptures, cast resin paintings, and performance documentation, present a mode of association, rhizomatic assemblage, and autofiction that deeply resonate with fangirls' strategies.
Like an undiscovered time-capsule, Li's personal archive embodies the eternal resurgence of Y2K fashion trends, embracing kaleidoscopic elements of bimbocore, kawaii, and punk-emo aesthetic thriving on platforms like TikTok. Blurring mundane objects into artworks, she overlays handwritten notes to her teenage idols and posters with velveteen fabrics, translucent beads, and nostalgic girly items—like a CD player adorned with glossy pink, devilish writing that reads 'innocent.The punk-emo leitmotiv charges the redundant cuteness of these objects with a grotesque, uncanny aura. This tension is further emphasised by the textile components within Li's works, such as The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and All the Letters I Ever Written (2023).These elements bridge the gap between virtual and material reality, infusing digital aesthetics and the disembodied imaginary—so pervasive in our online experiences—with a tangible substance. Shuang Li's fandom methodology elevates seemingly trivial gadgets and charms doomed to oblivion—often lost or overlooked in the deluge of digital production—into cherished objects of affection.
Fandom and the technologies of romance also serve as core underpinnings in the performance documentation of Lord of the Flies (2022). Constrained by Europe's Covid-19 border closures during her opening at Antenna Space, Shuang Li delegated twenty performers, dressed in My Chemical Romance t-shirts that mirrored her personal style, to search for her friends in the Shanghai crowd. Each fangirl then proceeded to read a personal letter written by the artist to these friends on her behalf, capturing their reactions through spy glasses embedded with cameras. Starting from her personal experience of displacement, Lord of the Flies reflects on the virtual bodies and glitch of intimacy facilitated by online interactions while contemplating their inherent immateriality. Thus, every avatar, every alter-ego that multiplies and poetically doubles the body of Shuang Li simultaneously signifies her material absence. Quoting the artist, the performers' love letters —resembling the intermittence of TikTok dances — act "like glitches implanted in reality," demonstrating how the affective aspects of digital screens erupt into IRL.
In the multimedia documentation presented at Peres Project, 3D model platform boots and concrete-cast distorted leg warmers constellate the exhibition space, becoming tangible vessels of the performers' absences—and, by extension, the absence of fan idols. In fact, it is precisely the absence of stars' bodies, objects of affections, that creates a conceptual space for identification, personal expression, and desire in constant becoming. Yet which futures are mobilised by indulging in fangirls' fantasy and alter-egos? What are the implications on embodiment, construction of identity, and desire away-from-keyboard?
Shuang Li's approach to fandom as a methodology unveils a gesture of attachment and care, an ode to fangirls' fantasy and pleasures. Whether emo idols or overseas friends, fandom becomes a medium to reach someone and mobilise alternative realities.
At the threshold of virtual and material realities, Forever's assemblage of objects and media becomes a metaphor for our online manifestations, fracturing the idea of solid stable subjectivity and redefining interdependency within communities. Fangirls' experimentalism and collective negotiations initiate a process of self-discovery and autofiction that has tangible, long-term effect on the world. In this light, fangirls foster an alternative mode of signification and set of values, not based on the logic of production, but instead on affects, peer-networks, and care, eventually re-enchanting the world. In the ever-evolving landscapes of digital intimacy, fandom becomes a galvanising momentum from where unprecedented communities and visions of the world can emerge, a prefiguration of alternative realities and post-capitalist desire.