In Italo Calvino’s short story The Distance of the Moon (1965), people once climbed ladders to reach the moon until gravity suddenly shifted, leaving some forever stranded in space. During the Covid-19 pandemic, stuck in Europe and unable to return home to China, Shuang Li found unexpected solace in Calvino’s tale of cosmic separation. For the Berlin- and Geneva-based artist, the distance from family—though measured not in light years, but in unanswered messages, missed calls, and perhaps frozen screens—felt just as vast.