I found Charlie through a life modelling website, and it wasn’t until I showed this image to my PhD tutor that I discovered he is the son of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and kind of famous. I have been interested in feminism and gender issues since I was young. I’m currently studying at the Royal College of Art in London. When I started there I was using Tinder for dating, and was intrigued by the gender dynamic. For example, how men would swipe right a lot more than women did. I started getting interested in the male and female gaze and thought it would be interesting to use the app to find men for my photographs. I messaged a lot of men, but most of them ignored me. Or if they replied they would want something else. I chose the men partially because of personal preferences, but also, I didn’t want to photograph very stereotypically masculine men. In art history, we already have a lot of those. Eventually I stopped using Tinder after the whole process of talking to people on it, going to their homes and photographing them became very repetitive. And then I got banned from it – I had a solo show in Sweden and the gallerist thought it would be interesting to invite people to the opening via Tinder, but you’re not allowed to promote anything through the app. I think getting banned was actually quite a nice, funny end to the whole thing. I try to show men’s vulnerability in these photographs. I don’t want to portray them in a degrading way, and I don’t want to simply reverse the gender roles. I try to be the one who is in control, but this is a fantasy, because my power is never guaranteed. Even when I put myself in my work, it’s not like one person is definitely the subject and the other is definitely the object. In one of the images, I recreated Fuseli’s 1781 painting The Nightmare, in which there’s a woman lying on the bed, there’s a demon sitting on her belly, and the demon is trying to have sex with her while she sleeps. In my version, it was me sitting on a naked man. I made a picture called the Feast with a group of naked men, inspired by old paintings of groups of naked women. Half of them were life models and half were friends. I was trying to make a cornucopia of men, with different kinds of bodies. This picture was inspired by The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife by the Japanese artist Hokusai. His work is a very erotic scene of a naked woman with a small octopus and a gigantic octopus. Tentacles have always seemed to me very phallic. I woke up at four in the morning to get the octopuses from Billingsgate market in London. I got the biggest one I could find, although it’s a lot smaller than the one in Hokusai’s painting. I had to buy a whole box of the small ones which I then gave to Charlie and the other model on the shoot. I find the octopus so fleshy, so slimy, and really erotic. Some of my pictures, like this and others inspired by paintings, are in a way, me acting out my fantasies. I don’t think it was very pleasant for Charlie though. In fact, I guess it was a bit disgusting, but he didn’t complain. I think most of the men in my shoots have enjoyed them. I have made some video work with video chats in which I asked them to do something mundane for me to watch – like chopping carrots – but naked, and some of them really wanted to be looked at, and enjoyed it. I found that very interesting. I like the domestic space, that they are not doing something very obviously sexual or erotic. They’re just doing something from everyday life, but at the same time, there’s something a bit strange. That’s what I tried to achieve. I get obsessed with technical things, and I love the texture and the quality of analogue film. And because some of my work is directly related to the internet, it’s nice to have the contrast of shooting with film. I think some people find my work humorous - a sort of dry humour, and I’m quite happy to hear that, although I wasn’t trying to make these images funny. Yushi Li’s CV Born: Hunan, China, 1991. Trained: MA in photography and Phd in Arts and Humanities (present) at the Royal College of Art, London. Influences: Sophie Calle, Jeff Wall, John Berger, Jacques Lacan, Édouard Manet. High point: “Two galleries represented my works at Photo London at Somerset House this year.” Low point: “Starting my MA at the RCA – I felt really confused and lost at first.” Top tip: “It’s better to overexpose one stop when you shoot with film.”