Tim Yip’s first exhibition at the Today Art Museum, Illusions of Silence, made clear that despite the presence of photographic projections, this was no photography exhibition. The space was dominated by enormous sculptures suggesting futuristic hybrid forms with traces of human limbs. A series of exhibitions followed in natural progression beginning with Silent Passenger at the Three Shadows gallery in Beijing in 2013. It was there that the exhibition culminated in a huge standing figure of a sculptural figure named Lili — a young woman one might see on the streets of any Chinese city — reproduced in every detail on a gigantic scale. The question on everybody’s lips is ‘Who is Lili?’ As the title of this exhibition, Mirror, suggests, Lili offers us a reflection of ourselves. She is a vacuum. She contains nothing, yet if she is brought into the room, she changes the dynamic of the space around her. She is an agent of transformation. In the years since that first exhibition in the Today Art Museum in 2007, we have all changed. The world is mapped in a different way. Our understanding of what constitutes our ‘selves’ has to be balanced with the fact that the human brain where our ‘self’ resides is no longer a foreign continent. The blank spaces on its map are being filled, as are all the nervous highways that connect it. The human cell, at the nucleus of which lies the DNA in which our genetic history is charted, is now itself the subject of an enormous atlas. Lili propagates not DNA but ‘spiritual DNA’, an invisible binding force that links us all through a chain of memories to our deepest personal history. She offers a counterpoint to everything we can touch and call ‘real’. She never moves or even turns her head unless directed by the hands of others, yet she fixes us all with her gaze. It is in this territory of the intangible that Tim Yip makes art.