'PLAY HOUSE'

STATEMENT -For her series “Play House”, artist Aixia Li buys playhouse toys, photographs them, and finally edits the pictures. As a true multi media artist, Aixia Li uses different media for her other projects, like embroidery, video installations and photography. -The artificially high priced housing in China makes buying a house 'an almost impossible dream'. The internet plays a big role in people's lives, and the adult online game called 'Buy a House' -- a plug-in game to an online dating site to which many young people have become addicted -- responds to this. The game allows the players to make money and buy houses on the internet and to decorate the houses they own in the virtual world. In this way, adults are offered their ideal life online, rapidly; something impossible in real life, like children creating a grown-up house in a Playhouse. Adults and children share the same characteristics and contradictions when playing these games; in the Playhouse children can act as adults, while adults, when playing ‘Buy a House’, become children again and leave society behind. By immersing themselves in these games, people can avoid the troubles of reality. By creating a setting purely composed of toys purchased online, Li reflects on the transformation of childhood to adulthood -- and the common refusal to do so.