"My project "The Skin of a Human Being" discusses how people fit themselves  into a ready-made world—playing predetermined social characters,  wearing garments designed by me for this project, and agreeing with social  constructs, which brings a sense of security through certainty, but also  creates restrictions. The title refers to the social skin developed by constant  learning and imitating existing examples of behavior. We are living under  those social skins as though living under others’ experiences.

My mother is the first ‘other’ I met. I used to be genderless, but became a  woman by learning from her, mythological goddesses, and my reflection in  the eyes of others. In one of the images I wear a table-dress where floral  patterns painted on the table are collected from my mother's floral dresses— my mom's skin." Joy Li

Joy Li is an interdisciplinary artist working with film, performance art, theater and sculpture. She was born in 1999 in Gansu, China. In 2021, she will receive her BA degree in Interdisciplinary Sculpture with a Theater minor at Maryland Institute College of Art. Li has already been included in various important exhibitions including “Communication Strategies: From Checkers to Complex Systems” at Time Art Museum, Sichuan, China, and “Redirecting” at Tree Art Museum, Beijing, China. She has had a solo exhibition at the Gateway Gallery in Baltimore, MD. In 2020, her first theatrical production “Collective Dreaming” was shown in BBOX, MD, and it has been written about by Laurence Ross in BmoreArt.