Yang Li and Antoine D’Agata’s *Too Much But Not Enough* (Steidl, 2023) began with a fashion collaboration and expanded into an unusually direct encounter with women met across China. Rather than use professional models, Li and D’Agata approached more than 300 women from widely different backgrounds, ultimately shaping the book around 23 of them. The photographs are described as visceral and physically confrontational, while accompanying texts preserve the subjects’ own voices in transcript form. Together, image and testimony address self-knowledge and beauty, love and disillusion, personal freedom and social constraint.
The project is closely bound to Li’s design language: an underground, subcultural visual culture and a darkly romantic sensibility developed through his label, launched in 2012. D’Agata’s photographs do not soften the encounter into conventional fashion imagery. Their intensity—alongside the explicit reality of tears and anguish in some images—places the body, the face, and the spoken account under equal pressure. The result is a publication that treats fashion not simply as styling, but as a point of contact between identity, performance, vulnerability, and social expectation.
Its form is central to that proposition. The book comprises 23 LP-style album covers and booklets, each associated with one of the women, and is housed in a slipcase distressed by hand with tape. This structure gives the work the character of an assembled archive or set of personal records rather than a continuous editorial sequence. For collectors, that material and conceptual alignment is a significant reason to look closely: the design, the voices, and the photographs all reinforce the project’s individualistic, counter-cultural position. A 276-page English-language paperback, issued in a limited edition of 300, it is a collaborative document in which fashion publishing, portraiture, and first-person narrative remain inseparable.
