Becoming Through the Wound
Lingyi Li
Advisor: Theo Ellin Ballew
A digital film where voguing gestures inhabit scarred, prosthetic queer bodies, exploring survival, transformation, and the memory of wounds.
Project Description
Becoming Through the Wound is a digital film that explores the queer body as a site of transformation, memory, and survival. Using motion capture of voguing, an expressive dance form rooted in queer and ballroom culture, I capture gestures carried into a digital figure whose skin bears scars, metal structures, and traces of physical intervention. The body exists in a liminal space where it fractures, reforms, and resists erasure. The film moves between personal and collective histories, drawing from my early experience with surgical injury and the visual language of queer artists during the AIDS crisis. Through layered textures, synthetic prosthetic forms, and voguing gestures, the work reimagines the digital body as both an archive and a living choreography.
Technical Details
Motion capture data of voguing movements recorded with OptiTrack and Manus.
Custom MetaHuman figures modified with prosthetic elements and scar textures.
Skin surfaces created and painted in Substance Painter.
Animation and scene rendered in Unreal Engine.
Final film presented on dual suspended monitors mounted on medical monitor arms.
Research/Context
My project builds on both personal experience and collective queer history. It begins with my sensitivity to skin, shaped by an early surgical injury that made me more aware of the body as a site of sensation, transformation, and vulnerability.
Inspired by artists like Hannah Levy and Ivana Bašić, I explored the tension between synthetic structures and organic flesh, designing a digital figure marked by prosthetic interventions and scars.
At the same time, I looked to the collective scars of queer history—particularly how artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Jimmy DeSana, and David Wojnarowicz confronted loss, erasure, and survival during the AIDS crisis.
Within this context, voguing became central to my work: not just as dance, but as a form of embodied resistance, a language of survival written through gesture.
Together, these references frame my work as a digital reflection on scarred bodies, queer survival, and the ongoing process of becoming.