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TONY (TAO) LI

@tonytaoli

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FTDWL: Some shots taken during the photoshoot day taken in Eindhoven, The Netherlands by @tonytaoli

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a year ago

More photos of BLU

1,050 Screws (Full Thread Socket Cap, Full Thread Slotted Pan, Socket Button)
1,230 Flat Washers
110 Nickel Plated Spacers
1,050 Hexagon Nuts
189 Metal Components (Laser Cut & Bent, Stainless Steel, Carbon Steel)
7,330 cm² Sandblasted Toughened Glass by @tonytaoli

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a year ago

Dimensions Of The Diasphere (DOTD)

for
MA Contextual Design (In Progress)
@designacademyeindhoven

A first iteration of an ongoing effort to materialize instances of the Diasphere (the overlap between ethno-spheres formed through diasporic migration). This version tries to capture the familiarity of non-places for the Post-Diaspora caught between a somber departure and a longing for arrival through visual panoramas and soundscape.

Aluminum/Steel Tubes & Couplings
P2 LED Panels
Waxed Fabric
Adhesive Vinyl
Video on Loop (1:30)
Audio on Loop (1:30)

📸 @hsuuusc by @tonytaoli

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2 years ago

Brighton Brass (Making Of) taken in London, United Kingdom by @tonytaoli

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8 months ago

Brighton Brass  Brighton Brass is a furniture piece made from patinated brass sheets, using chemical etching to embed a memory vignette onto its surface. The source photograph was taken at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, a building shaped by Britain’s long fascination with imagined versions of the East. It sits within a history of western chinoiserie, where Eastern forms were filtered through imperial fantasy and desire. The brass surface is intentionally worn and will continue to age through handling, movement, and touch. The etched panel also opens to reveal a compartment for personal items, inviting the owner to develop their own archive of memory. The work considers furniture as a quiet witness of presence, shaped over time through use, rhythms, and movement.

Shown at @vanabbehuis for Days Like This exhibition hosted by @bureau.parso  Congratulations to all the other artists/designers on their wonderful work by @tonytaoli

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8 months ago

CruciFleX

An ironic sculpture presenting fitness as the new world religion. Exercise has assumed ritualistic and spiritual dimensions, placing the language of bodily discipline with iconography of devotion, sacrifice, and salvation. Part of an ongoing inquiry in the rise of fitness as faith, a system of belief marketed through supplements and lifestyle brands. Salvation is reached through devotion to rituals of penance for sins of gluttony and sloth. The gym has become the new temple, where we sculpt ourselves in pain and purification to inch closer to deity through diet. Closer to divinity. Immortality.

To be exhibited at presque demain, a group exhibition curated by @intersect.paris for France Design Week 2025 (@francedesignweek), hosted at @wildelelieu.

25 — 30 September
Opening Party / Vernissage: 25 September, 19:00 - 23:00
Location: 4, 6, 8 rue François Miron, 75004 Paris

Big thanks to Phil and the team at @cutonline for working with me to fabricate this piece.

Come see it in Paris next week.

#parisdesign #parisdesignweek #francedesignweek #design taken in Paris, France by @tonytaoli

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a year ago

From The Diasphere With Love (FTDWL)

This project explores the conceptual space shaped by diasporic experience, suspended between the Anglosphere and Sinosphere. This liminal ‘third space’ is where geopolitical narratives intersect with the personal realities of the East-Asian diaspora. Developed through conversations with second-generation migrants, the work challenges idealised narratives of cultural return, offering instead a portrait of complexity, alienation and quiet resilience.

Fragmented video interviews with members of the Sino-diaspora unfold within a dystopian landscape shaped by Techno-Orientalist tropes — voices often flattened in Western imaginaries. Here, gestures, pauses and reflections resist reduction, revealing layered inner lives.

Presented across two facing LED panel screens that form an elliptical space, the work invites viewers into a space of contrast and contemplation. The diasphere becomes not a fixed statement, but a space for listening, discomfort and identification, prompting questions about belonging, perception and the limits of cultural legibility.

Produced for MA Contextual Design (@designacademyeindhoven)

To be presented at Dutch Design Week 2025 (@dutchdesignweek)

October 17 — 26th at Microstad, Eindhoven

Special thanks to all the friends who participated in the interviews (whether the footage was used or not), I could not have completed the project without your help. Also big ups to @tileores for being a real one and helping me both times I’ve had to build this thing up. And @antonwvripon for blessing us at the end with some much needed help in the take down.

Come check it out in October! taken in Eindhoven, The Netherlands by @tonytaoli

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a year ago

Making of BLU (Blind Lucid Umbrella): Test Installation taken in London, United Kingdom by @tonytaoli

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a year ago

BLU (Blind Lucid Umbrella)

A light installation that examines the cultural, emotional, and technological legacy of the colour blue. It is a visual collage built from vestigial fragments of past eras and speculative visions of the future, inviting viewers to inhabit the glow of a hue that has shaped our relationship with technology, architecture, and time.

If the Industrial Revolution celebrated steel as the material of progress, the Technological Revolution became defined by transparency — glass facades, glowing screens, and the soft blue tint of futurism. By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, blue was everywhere. It became the colour of techno-utopian dreams and the promise of a frictionless, hyperconnected future. From Nokia, Sony, and Motorola adverts to the seamless glazing of skyscrapers, blue saturated visual culture. It appeared on album covers of electronic music artists, and in consumer products like Pepsi Blue, the iMac, and PlayStation 2.

Over time, blue’s symbolism shifted. Once tied to innovation and optimism, it has become corporate and extractive; the colour of Facebook, Amazon, and countless tech giants promising connection while harvesting attention. It is also the hue of blue-light, associated with sleep disruption, overstimulation, and the breakdown of circadian rhythms. Blue lingers as a spectral presence, oscillating between nostalgia for a hopeful digital dawn and the fatigue of an over-mediated present.

BLU glows an ethereal, familiar blue. Its industrial form recalls the glass-facade aesthetics of early-2000s architecture, referencing a moment when transparency and illumination carried futuristic promise. Visitors are invited to reflect whether this glow evokes nostalgia for a lost optimism about technology, or the overstimulation and extraction we now live with. In this way, BLU becomes an ambient rhythm analyzer, tracing how light, memory, and technology pulse through modern existence.

Exhibited at ARRHYTHMIA, during of 48 Stunden Neukölln (@48stundennk) at Centrum Berlin (@centrumberlin)

#48stundenneukölln #48hnk #y2kaesthetic #installationart #artforsale #contemporaryartwork #artworks #sculptureart #ledlights taken in Centrum by @tonytaoli

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a year ago

BLU (Blind Lucid Umbrella)

BLU is a lighting installation that immerses visitors in a field of UV blue — a color once emblematic of the turn-of-the-century technological optimism. The fixture hums a familiar yet estranging glow, evoking memories of digital interfaces, sleep-disrupting screens, and the promise of a hyper-connected future.

Captured within the glow of blue — once the face of innovation, futurism, and trust in the digital era — visitors are invited to examine their own emotional and bodily responses. For some, the hue may spark nostalgia, a recollection of early tech utopian promises, glowing screens, or rave culture. For others, it may echo the overexposure, fatigue, or overstimulation endemic to the post-digital world. In this way, BLU becomes an ambient rhythm analyzer: a subtle interrogation of how light, memory, and technology now rhythmically pulse through the structures of modern life.

To be exhibited at ARRHYTHMIA, curated by Niki Danai (@niki__danai) & Niki Maria Lore (@nkmrlr), in collaboration with PlusPlusPlus (@plusplusplus.live)

Hosted by Centrum Berlin (@centrumberlin) during 48 Stunden Neukölln (@48stundennk).

27—29.06.25

Centrum
Reuterstrasse 7
Berlin, Germany
12053

#48stundenneukölln #48hnk #artfestival by @tonytaoli

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a year ago

Beautiful pictures made by @smn_brynrt . Available soon online taken in Brussels, Belgium by @tonytaoli

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2 years ago

Pressure Pendant is a suspended light fixture measuring 63.63 cm, designed by Studio DogtoothTM (Tony Li and Anton Ripon). It is constructed from 3mm sandblasted aluminum sheets, laser-cut to form the outer structure, and an SLA resin-printed interior diffusion casing. by @tonytaoli

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2 years ago