Shuang Li: I’m Not | Après
Jul 01 2024
The Visionaries Shaping Aspen’s Creative Cosmos
Luminaries of Aspen’s art scene weigh in on the most exciting artists, exhibitions, and trends of the moment.
Sterling McDavid
CEO and Founder of Sterling McDavid Design
Sought-after designer and art collector Sterling McDavid has honed her aesthetic chops curating her family’s contemporary and modern art collection, which includes Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans, a Richard Prince, and a large-scale KAWS sculpture. The next big thing on her radar is the Aspen Art Museum’s Shuang Li exhibition, “I’m Not,” opening in November 2024. Following the museum’s ambitious museum-wide Allison Katz show, McDavid predicts “I’m Not” will be a landmark show for Aspen and for Li.
“Her video work Æther (Poor Objects), which was included in the 2022 Venice Biennale, very much felt like an arrival for the artist,” McDavid says. For the Aspen show, co-commissioned with Swiss Institute, Li is creating abstracted architecture in panels of pastel-tinted resin, affixed with video monitors that display Shuang’s music videos. They’re set to cover versions of the American rock songs she used to learn English in her youth, translated into Li’s native Chinese.
McDavid pointed to the show as exemplary of the museum, the wider Aspen art scene, and its patrons, who she believes embrace creative risk and diversity like few other places in the world. “I think a lot of that has to do with the sophistication of the collectors in Aspen,” she says. “People take risks, and I see a much more interesting mix here.”