Press Release

 

A26 Ep. 17

Li Xindi “Token, Slot, As They Are”

 

Curated by Chen Junyao

AUG. 29 - OCT.15, 2025

 

A26 Space is honored to present Li Xindi’s solo exhibition, Token, Slot, As They Are, on view from August 29th to October 19th, 2025. Curated by Chen Junyao, the show invites the audience to actively participate in the artworks through a set of rules conceived by the artist. Structured around the triadic relation of “Human → Token → Slot,” the project examines how the artist’s individual practice engages with the ecosystem of contemporary art, institutional mechanisms, and the nuanced interactions between commercial logics and art spectatorship.

 

At the core of the exhibition lies the conceptual dyad of “Token” and “Slot,” around which a visual statistics-management system is constructed. This system facilitates a dynamic interplay among the gallery space, daily participants, and artworks, emphasizing the tension between individual presence and the system‘s “effectiveness” within the art world. Through this framework, the artist also reflects on the obsession with efficiency and the alienation of labor under late capitalism—a condition in which human subjectivity must be abstracted into legible, systematic units to attain validity—thus urging a revaluation of both the value of labor and the meaning of existence.

 

Within the exhibition, visitors are transformed from passive viewers into active agents of the system. The act of entry activates a “Token,” and affixing this Token onto a wall-mounted “Slot” performs a subtle mimicry of how individuals are encoded, identified, and assimilated into the chains of productive efficiency. This participatory mechanism reveals a central paradox of modern production: the Token functions simultaneously as an identifier through which systems regulate individuals, and yet also serves as a testament to one’s own presence and agency.

 

Accompanying the exhibition is a booklet designed by the artist, which includes research notes from the curator that expand on these themes. As the curator articulates: “This project constructs a critical framework through which the ethics of ‘deep work’ are examined under the triangulated complicity of Tokens, Slots, and the spectator’s gaze. By means of a highly rationalized, nearly austere system design, the viewer is situated within a continuous state of negotiation—a liminal field of perpetual exchange.”

​

​​​

​

Documentations by Lin Ban Ye