Yushi Li’s eerily beautiful photos depict her ‘ultimate’ erotic fantasies

“I want to be that demon,” thought Yushi Li when she came across Henry Fuseli’s oil painting, “The Nightmare” (1781). The gothic scene depicts a woman asleep in her boudoir, her arms thrown behind her head in a pose of total surrender – or rapture. Crouching on her chest is an incubus, a folkloric demon believed to seduce sleeping women. Offering both the image of a dream and a dream image, the painting’s entanglement of eroticism and horror transfixed early viewers, and even influenced psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious. Fascinated by Fuseli’s slippery staging of power and desire, Li did what she does best: she turned her fantasy into a photograph.

Her own interpretation of Fuseli’s painting is currently showing at Dwelling (a group exhibition by Meeting Point Projects) exploring the construction of identity within domestic space. Restaged in the mundane setting of a living room, a plate of leftovers on the floor, Li assumes the role of the predatory incubus, sitting on the torso of a sleeping man. He is naked and vulnerable, she is clothed and in control, meeting the viewer with her inscrutable stare. It’s a visual logic that has come to characterise Li’s ongoing exploration of desire, the gaze, and the complex power dynamics between looker and looked at.

The photograph is from her series Paintings, Dreams and Love, which reimagines scenes from art history and classical mythology. Among her ambitious restagings is “The Dream of the Fisherwoman”, a recreation of Japanese painter Hokusai’s erotic woodcut, “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” (1814). In the original, the fisherman’s wife is kissed by one octopus and eaten out by another. In Li’s remake, an ethereal man lies in a bathtub, one octopus covering his genitals, the other resting on his chest. Li’s image is eerie in its beauty; gentler in its desire. “In all my photographs, the female figure is no longer the object of someone else’s dream or desire, but the one who is doing the dreaming and desiring,” she explains.

Li’s interest in these themes began with her now infamous series My Tinder Boys, in which she procured men from dating apps and photographed them naked in their kitchens. “I was using Tinder at the time and was interested in the way people interacted,” she says. “It’s a very fast-paced, image-based way of connecting with people. The men I spoke to were very direct about looking for sex, so I thought it would be fun to use it as a way to hunt for men for my images. Both are forms of objectification, in my mind.”

Of those who agreed, very few had modelled before, let alone naked for a stranger. There’s a resultant softness to the masculinity on show – quite literally, in the profusion of flaccid dicks, but also in the awkwardness of the poses, which Li loves. While the series partially satisfied her desire to interrogate digital intimacy, she wanted to dive deeper into the idea of the gaze, and turned to the theories of Laura Mulvey and John Berger, and the psychoanalysis of Lacan. “I started putting myself in the pictures to create more complex looking relations, with me being both the model and the photographer – the looker and the looked at,” Li says. 

“So much of the fantasy is that it’s suspended just out of reach” – Yushi Li

In her next series, Your Reservation Is Confirmed, she appears next to the naked men as they engage in domestic tasks and children’s games. Sometimes she interacts with them, sometimes she seems completely detached, as though inserted into the image afterwards. By holding the shutter release, Li strives to make clear that she is in the position of control – “that’s my ultimate desire, my fantasy”. Yet, there’s an ambivalence to these images, underscored by her deadpan expression: “I want my viewers to be uncertain about my relationship to these men. It’s not quite romantic, not quite maternal.”

Discussing her participation in Dwelling, Li highlights the importance of domestic space in her work. In My Tinder Boys, her unsettling of gender dynamics takes place in the feminine-coded setting of the kitchen, while the melodramas of Paintings, Dreams and Love largely play out around the home. These intimate spaces imbue her fantasies with a sense of immediacy, reflecting the way our wildest dreams and desires often take shape in the quiet of the everyday.

But even as Li grounds her fantasies in domestic settings and crystallises them with her lens, drawing them ever closer, she also meditates on their elusiveness. This is especially true of “The Smothering Dream”, a hallucinatory scene in which Li lies across a sofa, while six naked men emerge from a bed of pink rose petals beneath her. It’s a take on Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1888 painting, “The Roses of Heliogabalus”, depicting the decadence and hedonism of Roman emperor Elagabalus. Part of a diptych, Li’s second image, “After the Dream”, captures the same rose-covered scene devoid of its flesh-and-blood subjects. It’s an echo of what came before, with props and furniture all that remains.

“It reveals the impossibility of sustaining the fantasy,” Li remarks. As with her earlier work on internet intimacy, she sees this dance between desire, attainment and illusion as like scratching a perpetual itch. “I think there’s frustration but also pleasure in this never-ending process of longing. So much of the fantasy is that it’s suspended just out of reach.”

Li will soon complete her PhD on the topic of the gaze, sexuality, and spectatorship, which she’s been writing in tandem with her image-making. But her exploration of the ever-shifting dynamics of desire is likely to be a lifelong one.  

Dwelling, a group exhibition by Meeting Point Projects (67a York Street, London W1H 1QB), is running until October 4, 2024.