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.

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.

Exhibition Review
and the knife used to feed us by Joelle Mercedes

and the knife used to feed us

The lore or etymology of “cocktail” points us in many directions. The one I find the most curious describes the act of gingering, or to feague a horse. This practice requires inserting an irritant, such as ginger, into the anus of a horse, which encourages the animal to carry its tail high and move in a more buoyant manner.

Image Credit: Eugene I-Peng Tang

The anus is an erogenous zone
The anus is the anchor
The anus is a multitude of nerves

Pin the tail on the donkey
Tip over the cow
Make me your dog

Image Credit: Joelle Mercedes

smear slice spit spurious
spice stitch spoon sticky
skull sponge scar slime
spirit scaffold suspension
saliva sex spine sorbet
soufflé sufferable sit soil

Window One:
The black curtain provides a backdrop for five drawings—a colorful house on a teal submerging surface, ghosts sitting on a dining room table, a bedroom with a charcoal-stained mattress, a face with a forearm or an insect hovering over it with a belt, and an adolescent in a cheerful pose, wearing knee high socks, and a flaccid penis.

The background installation uses white strips to render a triangular roof alongside a large circular image that reminds me of a fruit cocktail cake, and modular building toys designed for toddlers. The strips also illustrate a centipede, hungry caterpillar-like intestine, that bleeds into the foreground.

This window is a feast of illusions. The foreground uses watercolor strips to construct other characters by a table. One figure is in a seated position as a child would be when opening their birthday gifts. Another figure with a muscular body holds a knife, and cuts open a colorful multi-tiered cake. All the distinct elements begin to integrate, transmuting the scenes of domesticity into a garden filled with ouroboros and a ring of fire made of confetti. The sun and the penetrating force of the streetlights activate this carnival childhood of desire and night terror.

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***Countersexual Manifesto by Paul B. Preciado, translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn***

manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material
manipulate my material manipulate my material manipulate my material

Window Three:
This beauty of a beast is phenotypically an intersection between the PBS children's animated series Arthur, a wild coyote starting back, and the Leather Daddy archetype. This figure is alluring yet unsettling, like one encountered in a Grimm Brothers’ fairytale. Tread lightly as the charms of cannibalism radiate throughout this window. The sweaty horse awaits its procedure against the barn house and prairie.

Andy is my sister in rigor. I asked him to help me compose a reading list to guide the viewer through all the show's idiosyncrasies.

● Playing and Reality & The Squiggle Game by D.W. Winnicott
● Knots by R.D. Laing
● “In the Name of Bobby” by Julio Cortázar
● Clown: The Physical Comedian by Joe Dieffenbacher
● Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia by Avgi Saketopoulou (borrowed from
Zachary Nicol’s expansive library)
● The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson
● How to Love by Thich Nhat Hanh, a short essay on “Channeling Sexual Energy”

Andy and I love continuous research: reading, watching YouTube videos, attending film festivals, embodied practices, listening to DJ mixes, describing unique textures in food and humor, and frequently seeking quietude. We are two Tasmanian devils born during the most erotic time of the year. We share the planet Venus as our astrological natal chart ruler. We are united by red and a meticulous variety of particularities. We met in the driftless region of the Midwest at an art residency. We became close along the prairie, the stream, the river, the mosquitoes, and the starlight skies.

Image Credit: Andy Li

I first encountered the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul at Specialty Video & DVD in Andersonville. The store is no longer open but when I lived on the North Side ten years ago it was fundamental to my growth as an artist and filmmaker. They carried experimental porn, the Criterion Collection, B movies, cult classics, films from auteur directors, films that blurred the lines of genre, and so much more. I borrowed Tropical Malady on DVD and watched it on the old television in my carpeted living room. I was alone watching the film, overwhelmed by the saturated darkness, the bubbly tenderness between Keng and Tong, the titillating waltz/haunt between tiger and soldier, the movie theater scene, the licking of the knuckles, and all the spiritual transfiguration. The film brought my carnal desires to the foreground, and revealed deep entanglements between humans and animals. The human submits to the animal, and the animal submits to the human.

“Monster, I give you my spirit, my flesh and my memories,” Keng’s voice says.

Andy and I connect deeply through our love of Weerasethakul. His slow cinema gives us a playground where we can come to our bodies, wild desires, and braininess with devotion. The work of the exhibition is slow cinema.

The quotidian, silence, repetition, nothingness, long takes, landscape, stillness, little dialogue, meditative quality.

Now I want us to taste the Fruit Cocktail Cake. Cut yourself a slice. As you enter the fluffy cake into your mouth, picture your adolescence. The squishiness of your brain is still developing, this moist substance, this ripe fruit.

Squiggle Wrestle

Performance with Andy Nicholas Li and Zachary Nicol

Thursday January 16, 2025 at 7pm

Andy Nicholas Li and Zachary Nicol will perform a "squiggle wrestle" in the windows of Co-Prosperity, as a closing event to Andy's exhibition, FRUIT COCKTAIL CAKE. This performance spins the playful methods of D.W. Winnicott's squiggle game in child therapy, where Winnicott and the child draw intuitive squiggles and respond to each other by completing the drawing into creatures and symbols. Andy and Zachary will explore physical play with instinct and reaction, drawing from wrestling, cuddling, and dance improv.

Hot tea will be available for audience members. Please feel free to bring your own mug!