FRUIT COCKTAIL CAKE
Andy Nicholas Li
December 6, 2024 - January 17, 2025
Co-Prosperity presents FRUIT COCKTAIL CAKE, the first solo exhibition of Chicago artist Andy Nicholas Li.
When you let the child cut the cake, the possibilities come open. Among family and friends, the birthday child makes the first slice with a kitchen knife, through the whipped cream and the glossy red letters. The idea is to pose for the picture: a kid with a knife in hand, comedy found in the edges of fear. He would never do anything with that knife but cut the cake and smile. Even though he plays with swords and scissors and cuts the hair off of Barbie to repaint her in his gay image of beauty.
Clocks and calendars move in circles, as do the fruits on top of a Chinese fruit cocktail cake: the sliced kiwis and strawberries, the plump balls of cantaloupe. Each birthday marks the occasion of aging, as the child moves into adolescence. The parents reckon with the adult child: how is it that the wiggling bundle in the crib is now thinking and moving for himself? The adult confronts his own uneasy transformation: what happens when growth feels inconsistent with time? The adult and the child show up and shift within the same aging body. The aging child stares into the mirror and restructures the possibilities for who he was and will become.
FRUIT COCKTAIL CAKE is an exhibition of drawing, sculpture, and installation that examines the psychic terrain crossed between the child and the adult. Allured by the modularity of the alphabet and childhood toys, Andy constructs wall drawings with painted strips, a playroom with folded cardboard props, and messages with letters and gestures. On display in the windows of Co-Prosperity, queer signals punctuate the reflective surfaces in the form of rainbow fruits, family pictures reinterpreted, and postures of flamboyance and melancholy.
The location of this exhibition in Bridgeport is especially significant, the neighborhood where Andy grew up. He ran around with his cousins in White Sox parking lots, was called names on the street, and now takes his parents out to lunch on Halsted. The show saunters through the celebratory traditions with which Andy grew up in a Cantonese home in Chicago. It draws from the tales of children’s capacity to live between recreation and danger, as in Julio Cortázar’s short story “In the Name of Bobby.” Finally, it investigates the act of clowning, where the adult takes the world with the openness of the child.
Programming
Friday January 10, 2025: Performance with Andy Nicholas Li and Zachary Nicol (time TBA)
Artist Bio
Andy Nicholas Li is an artist and educator based in Chicago, IL and Ithaca, NY. Andy works with drawing, installation, fiction, and food to conjure the contradictions of identity and intimacy. Symbols and materials in Andy’s work bear the sticky construction of a person, between Cantonese, Midwestern, queer, lonely, childish, grown.
Andy’s work has been exhibited at ACRE Projects, the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and Hyde Park Art Center, among others. Collaborative projects have appeared at places like AS220, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Singapore Art Book Fair. Andy’s short story, “Prologue to the Death of Julian,” was published in The Notre Dame Review. Some of Andy’s paintings are featured in New American Paintings, Midwest #167. Andy has also spent time at residencies and workshops at ACRE, the Bridge Program at Hyde Park Art Center, Ox-Bow School of Art, Ragdale, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
From 2019-2023 Andy worked at Marwen, developing exhibitions and programs for alumni and young artists in Chicago. Andy holds a BA from Brown University, and is an MFA candidate in Art at Cornell University.