The effects brought by the Coronavirus that hit the United States are profound. Even till today, despite the death rate not being as high as it was, the unemployment rate and the inflation rate will say the opposite. Not surprisingly, some start to wonder what the world would be like if the Covid-19 was taken seriously at the beginning of 2020. Li xin Li Studio, an art studio that aims at illustrating emotions, launched Eclipse of Reason 2020 in regards to this sentiment.
Xinli Li, the founder of the studio, noticed that it‘s pretty interesting Covid-19 is not the first pandemic that provoked racial hateness. Same thing happened with Japan when the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster took place. People tend to see laying hands on the responsible party as their priority instead of dealing with the situation immediately, which is unbelievably sick, in Li’s opinion.
“Humanity can be misled easily, especially when something devastating happens, something that none of us has experienced before,” Li says, “and that is where the inspiration of Eclipse of Reason 2020 comes from.”
Li created approximately 7 scenes in this project to present the different reaction of parties when a pandemic begins. While the main characters are fighting against each other and trying to find out whom to blame, innocent citizens are dying on the side, which was a reflection of how the US government was attacking China but failing to realize that saving their own people’s lives was what mattered in early 2020.
“I wanted to generate an ironic story version of Covid-19 to remind people of what’s important in life when an unexpected disaster happens,” Li demonstrates, “it broke my heart when I saw multiple innocent Asians getting attacked on streets or being pushed off platforms by random people and how each party has led the whole country against another. It’s not that complicated at all and everyone was just getting carried away.”
Li pointed out that there was and there will always be one certain group taking their anger and the unfairness from real life out on another group to feel satisfied. Even though each individual is stressed out at some point, they will assemble and come to an agreement when an obvious target appears.
Each frame of Eclipse of Reason 2020 is hand-drawn by a carbon pen, according to Li. And he followed a routine where the next scene was always created after the last scene was erased, establishing a sense of tracking that mirrors the profound effects of Covid. As a visual artist, Li strategically combines animation and the traditional painting methods to expand the dimensions of his work and successfully adds social values to it.
