Universe of Language

The nearly 150-year-old custom of using body language to initiate trades among traders was officially put to rest in 2021 with the closing of the Chicago Stock Exchange’s trading floor, becoming a symbol of an entire financial era. Since the dawn of civilization, the relationship between hands and numbers has been ingrained in our trading culture. Even today, many parts of China still bargain in public using the “hand in the sleeve” technique. When the idea of “Universe of Language” takes on the sense of “trading gestures” and draws on the discussion of “dimensionality” in fractal mathematics, it ends up providing a new formula of visual expression to describe “how we use our body to measure and communicate the world through mathematics.”

LIU Guangli
LIU Guangli 刘广隶 was born in 1990 in Lengshuijiang, China. He currently lives and works in Paris. He graduated from Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in 2020. Guangli’s works often emerge from the intersection of different approaches to depicting history and events, and ultimately find their own places in installations, videos, documentaries, and paintings that suggest our understanding of the present is often shaped by pre-existing languages, social norms, and media formats through which pieces of information are transmitted. He won the Golden Nica and Honorary Mention in the Computer Animation category at Ars Electronica (2021, 2022), as well as the Golden Key for Best Short Film at Kassel Dokfest (2021), Special mention price at Jimei Arles Discovery Award (2023), Outstanding Art Exploration Award at Beijing International Short Film Festival (2023).