Walking down Singapore’s River Valley, it’s easy to forget how strange our sense of place has become. Trains arrive on time. Screens glow steadily. News of floods, fires, and storms elsewhere scrolls past in real time, absorbed between meetings and meals. It’s precisely this dissonance—between speed and stillness, proximity and distance—that artist Shuang Li taps into with Alliance, her first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia, opening at Kim Association this January.

Li, who splits her time between Berlin and China’s Wuyi Mountains, is known for work that feels uncannily attuned to life online: the way images travel faster than bodies, how catastrophe becomes content, and how identity forms across porous borders. In Alliance, a newly commissioned video installation, she turns her attention to storm chasing—once a niche American pursuit, now a global spectacle livestreamed across platforms—as a way of thinking about how we navigate contemporary life.

Storm chasing, in Li’s hands, is less about adrenaline and more about acceleration. It becomes a metaphor for living inside systems that are always in motion: algorithmic feeds, financial flows, climate systems pushed to extremes. Watching a storm approach from thousands of kilometres away, Li suggests, isn’t so different from watching the world unfold through a screen—present, but not quite there.

The exhibition takes its name from Alliance, Nebraska, a railway town Li passed through during her own storm-chasing journey across the United States. It’s a place defined by transit rather than destination, a “non-space” that resonates with her long-standing interest in environments that feel anonymous yet charged. Developed in collaboration with architect Luis Ortega Govela of Office LOG, the installation subtly echoes the experience of riding a high-speed train in China: the uncanny sensation of sitting perfectly still while hurtling forward at immense speed.

That feeling may be especially familiar in Singapore. Known for its frictionless infrastructure and finely tuned systems: climate control, capital flow, connectivity; the city offers an ideal backdrop for Alliance. Beneath the surface efficiency, Li’s work hints at shared vulnerabilities: environmental precarity, digital fatigue, and the quiet anxiety of constant velocity. The exhibition doesn’t point fingers or offer solutions; instead, it creates space to sit with that in-between state, where movement and stasis coexist.

Li’s sensitivity to these tensions can be traced back to her upbringing. Growing up in the Wuyi Mountains in the early 2000s, her window onto the world came through pirated media: bootleg CDs, knockoff Nintendo games, and the wild west of the pre–Great Firewall internet. Myspace pages, early YouTube clips, and emo anthems by bands like My Chemical Romance became unlikely teachers—of geography, language, and global youth culture. Those early encounters with mediated reality, filtered through unstable channels, shaped her lifelong fascination with how culture circulates and mutates.

Today, Li’s practice spans video, performance, sculpture, and interactive websites, and her work has appeared everywhere from the Whitney Biennial to the Venice Biennale. She has collaborated with fashion houses like Miu Miu, yet her work resists easy categorization or spectacle. Instead, it often lingers in the cracks: between online and offline, East and West, intimacy and distance.

At Kim Association, a young project space housed in a renovated shophouse, Alliance feels at home. The space was founded to explore transnational Asian perspectives, and Li’s practice—shaped by migration, uneven information flows, and constant translation—embodies that ethos. Artistic director Christina Li (no relation) has positioned the space as one for conversation as much as exhibition, and Alliance invites precisely that kind of reflective engagement.

Rather than overwhelming viewers with imagery, the installation unfolds at its own pace. It asks what it means to witness disasters we cannot touch, to feel connected yet detached, and to inhabit systems that promise seamlessness while quietly eroding boundaries between lived experience and its digital shadow.

In the end, Alliance isn’t really about storms. It’s about the way we move through the world today—watching, scrolling, passing through—caught between forces much larger than ourselves. For anyone who has ever felt strangely still while everything else accelerates, Li’s exhibition offers a moment of recognition.

Shuang Li: Alliance runs from 21st January to 22nd March 2026 at Kim Association, Singapore. Private visits are available by appointment. More information available here