Lili by Tim Yip
Leading Asprey Studio’s presentation at booth Z4 at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026, Lili is a monumental 4.5m-high installation, which inhabits a utopian yet dystopian psychological terrain, confronting themes of technological innovations and the uncertainty of the future.
Who is Lili?
Conceived by Tim Yip in 2009, Lili began as a bronze sculpture titled Desire — a statue that wept real tears of water. Over time, she evolved into a human-like, mannequin-like presence, styled with dark glasses and costumes evoking a young Eastern woman.
Though physically static, Lili occupies a dynamic psychological space. She functions as a cipher between past and future — a surface onto which viewers project their own memories and emotions. She is both a vessel of Yip’s imagination and a mirror of collective human experience within an artificially constructed world.
The Suspended City Garments
At Art Basel Hong Kong, Lili appears clad in cyberpunk, dystopian garments drawn from Tim Yip’s visionary project Suspended City. The costumes evoke a speculative future — an illusory world in which humanity no longer lives on Earth, but inhabits cities suspended in space.
The Suspended Cities are self-sustaining worlds powered not only by technology, but by human emotion. The city is structured in layered realms: an elevated sphere of control and vision above, and a densely networked, energy-producing world below. At its core lies a living “heart” directly connected to the human heart — a system where architecture and emotion function as one.
Lili embodies this world. Her dystopian garments are not just costumes – meticulously layered in leather and textiles - , but artifacts from this imagined civilization — visual expressions of hierarchy, survival, escape, and transcendence. Each look reflects the tension between power and vulnerability, control and collapse, distance and connection.
The other Costumes
As an acclaimed costume designer and art director, Tim Yip brings exceptional narrative depth to Lili’s evolving wardrobe. Yip received the BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and his background in cinematic world-building informs each of Lili’s transformations.
Lili’s many costumes reflect her multiple iterations — each garment embodying a different emotional, temporal, or dystopian dimension of her persona. Fashion becomes both armor and memory, projection and identity. Lili is on sale at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 along with 10 different costumes.
In 2025, Lili appeared in the exhibition MIRROR GARDEN at the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, presenting an extensive exploration of these evolving forms. The catalogue is available at the Asprey Studio booth (Z4) during Art Basel Hong Kong.
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Enquiries
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