Yellow Line

Selected Frames from Yellow Line

Yellow Line, 2022. Single-channel HD video, color, no sound (loop), 1'05", dimensions variable.

Yellow Line is a single-channel video artwork that explores the relationship between the body, urban space, and the invisible structures that shape everyday experience. The work emerged from the artist's reflection on the yellow road markings encountered in the city—symbols of order, boundaries, repetition, and movement. By placing the shadow of a running body directly along the yellow line, the work brings a bodily presence into contact with a familiar element of urban infrastructure.

Using a smartphone and the natural light of late afternoon, Le Xi captures the moving shadow of the body as it runs along the yellow line. The road surface, the texture of the marking, shifting light, and the movement of the body become a unified visual field. Through the overlap of shadow, line, and movement, the yellow marking gradually becomes more than a boundary within the street: it becomes part of the body's visual presence.

Rather than offering a fixed opposition between restriction and freedom, Yellow Line explores the unstable space between them. Repetition and movement create a tension between following a given trajectory and finding another possibility within it. By reducing the visual language to the yellow line, asphalt, light, shadow, and bodily movement, the work invites viewers to consider how rules, spaces, and patterns of everyday life become intertwined with our physical and perceptual experience.

Read more about Le Xi’s artistic approach →

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Artist: Le Xi 奚乐