Valuing the Time and Authenticity: A Preliminary Review of the Jewellery Work of Li Yi

It’s known that Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault raised the question of authorship in the 1960s with a profound influence across the field and the globe. This essay, however, through a brief review of the development of the notion of “Author Jewelry,” consciously incorporates the artist Li Yi’s latest practice, produced in the period of COVID-19 lockdowns, into this framework. With the analysis of the cause of seizing the time, the essay aims to point out how the authenticity that sculpts the core of an artist’s work is derived and how the autonomous consciousness of the individual artist is shaped. This contextualized discourse is a deep concern for the society we are now living in, in which the truth and lies are hard to distinguish, so the reinterpretation of authenticity in today’s context is reasonably crucial. That finally generates a conclusion—the birth and death of authorship are two sides of the same coin. As in an artist’s work, both one-off design and batch-produced art pieces are the evidence. In ways, the new tonality and proposition of generalized authors are aroused. As the involvement of a wider range of authors, the current sense of authenticity becomes the key to contemporary expression.