This print is a still from Xi Li’s video work Spirit Ether, which presents a world in which capitalism determines not only the aesthetic of cities, but also permeates a spiritual realm. In the work, the viewer is swallowed by a digital space lit by a capitalist sun, where scale and perspective are distorted by their market function to sell. Outsize symbols—carousel horses, billboards, jumbo jets, pagodas, skyscrapers, yuan signs, dollar signs, a series of colossal babies—loom and recede as we move through the no-space and no-time of the video.

Spirit Ether by Xi Li 李曦 was The Physics Room’s Ōtautahi offsite project for 2021