Li Jun Li: Best in Red

I can’t get enough of how Li Jun Li moves. If you’ve seen Sinners as many times as I have, you should have That Scene memorised by now – as Miles Caton’s Sammie performs “I Lied To You” at the juke joint, and everyone’s molecules become possessed by the music, at one point the camera follows Li Jun Li’s character, Grace, as she shimmies/undulates/sinuates from the bar to the side room to find her husband. She is sexy AF when she’s dancing, and Li-Li, as the Sinners team calls her, repeated those moves during the “I Lied To You” performance at the Oscars last night, almost exactly. And it was just as mesmerising.

She’s so good at it because she has a background in dance. And that also serves her well on the red carpet, because she understands how to use her body to showcase the clothes. Li-Li was in a magnificent Gaurav Gupta, it’s even better in person. When she was at the glambot just a few feet below me, I could see how precisely constructed the dress was, how perfectly tailored, the smallest and most exquisite details in the sculpture and the shape. And that train. The train wasn’t just unusual – to me, the way I saw it, the train was symbolic.

Li-Li plays a woman of Chinese descent in the film, representative of the Chinese immigrants living in the Mississippi Delta. Ryan Coogler, during the Sinners awards run, has talked about the diversity in this film. He grew up watching films and shows where even if there we few Black people, and not necessarily marketed to the Black community, he could still relate to the storytelling anyway. Now that he’s a filmmaker himself, Ryan has shared multiple times during Q&As and panel sessions that he gets why people from a variety of different backgrounds and cultures see themselves in his work. For Li-Li then, to be involved in this project, representing the Chinese diaspora, and attending the Oscars for the first time as part of the team, it had to have been profoundly meaningful, and this is reflected in her dress choice.

Red, of course, in the colour, but also the train, the way it extends out in strands, not unlike the red threads of destiny from Chinese mythology – invisible strings of fate that connect us to those we are bound to, even before we know it. The way the train is arranged on the carpet, it almost looks like Chinese knots, even a 2D version of a Chinese wedding pompom. It’s not super obvious, but she made a few subtle allusions to reflecting her culture on the carpet last night, and signs are meant for those who know where to look and what to look for. From where I’m sitting, message received.