Your Reservation Is Confirmed by Yushi Li, made over more than a year around London and first shown in 2018, stages nude male life models in rented Airbnb interiors, often alongside the photographer's fully clothed figure.
The project extends Li's earlier My Tinder Boys, replacing Tinder encounters in kitchens with online procurement: she rented an "ideal" home through Airbnb and booked an "ideal" man through a life-modeling website. The premise examines commodified desire and the gap between digital promise and embodied encounter. By appearing as photographer, viewer, and viewed figure, Li complicates a simple reversal of the male gaze. Power shifts among maker, sitter, and audience, while her presence as a Chinese woman alongside often white men addresses the Western fetishization of Asian women.
Each staged tableau places a nude man within a setting of domestic comfort, leisure, or upkeep. Sitters water plants, stretch, practice yoga, skip, or handle play materials. Li is clothed and facing the camera, creating an immediate contrast with the exposed male body. Toys, furnishings, gardens, and ordinary gestures make the encounters both familiar and displaced. The men's awkwardness remains visible, while Li's unresolved relationship to them creates the deadpan, humorous, and uncanny register she sought.
Li planned and arranged each scene, directed the sitters' poses and actions, and kept the actual shooting comparatively brief. For self-portraits, she normally triggered the camera from within the frame using a long cable or remote shutter release. Selection and analog printing took substantially longer, reflecting Li's preference for photography's slow, tactile process and its contrast with online imagery. Individual works were produced as C-type prints.
The series debuted in Li's 2018 Royal College of Art graduate exhibition in London. Garden and Stairs appeared at Fotomuseum Winterthur's Plat(t)form in 2019, followed that year by Li's first solo exhibition at Fotogalleri Vasli Souza in Malmö. Skipping was included later that year in Neo Hua Ren: New Diaspora in London. Garden won the Popular Vote in Travers Smith's 2018/19 CSR Art Programme. The project was subsequently included with several other bodies of work in Li's 2022 debut book, Baroness.
