Still from Nothing to do here but Wait, 2025, Single Channel Video.

September 12 – October 26, 2025
Wednesday – Sunday, noon – 6PM
Opening: September 12, 6 – 8PM

147 West 35th St, #211
New York, NY 10001

Mandarin Express is pleased to announce the launch of its exhibition program with a solo presentation by Amiko Li, Nothing to do here but Wait, on view from September 12th, 2025. As the organization’s inaugural exhibition, this presentation marks Li’s first New York project conceived for a temporary, alternative-space setting, debuting a new moving-image work alongside sculptural and installation pieces. The choice signals Mandarin Express’s commitment to championing Sinophone artists in experimental exhibition formats that break from the limits of the white cube and cultivate new relations between art and audiences.

Nothing to do here but Wait posits the elevator as an ostensibly nondescript space of everyday waiting—recasting it as a metaphor for temporary dwelling that sharpens one’s sense of existence and orientation. The motif of “waiting” speaks to our recent experiences of uncertainty: when faced with an unknown future, we long for change, closeness, and clarity, yet often find ourselves held in suspension—like elevator-riders caught in between movements, inhabiting an interval charged with hope and cruel optimism.

Li describes the work as a “minor imagination” of the elevator, echoing Gilles Deleuze’s idea of a “minor literature” that releases new potentials out of a given normal. Here, the elevator is loosened from a fixed route and linear logic, treated instead as a conceptual and affective space. 

The curation is intentionally slow-paced: at a time when attention is treated as capital, the exhibition rewards those willing to spend time with it, challenging the expectation that art must operate as spectacle. The audience, while standing on the conveyor belt, is compelled to move only so they can remain still. In this tension between voluntarily staying still and being mechanically carried forward, waiting emerges not as a neutral pause but as an enforced condition.

Threaded with fragments of Li’s elevator memories from growing up in Shanghai and other cities, this exhibition also probes how the elevator mediates between public and private experience. Language—voiced in more than one tongue—unfolds with deliberate fractures of syntax and grammar, allowing the spatial-temporal conditions of speech to choreograph the body’s presence in time and space. Rather than hastening to name what is felt, the work attends to the weight and intensity of thought and emotion in this transitional conduit. As the doors open and close, mundane footage collapses into a fictional register, recasting the elevator not as a minor, linear passage of modern architecture but as a metaphor of temporary dwelling that sharpens awareness of one’s own presence and orientation. 

Nothing to do here but Wait is organized with gratitude to our interns: Yiru Li, Julie Nidanrui Zhu, and Minqiu Dong.

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