Shao Chun at Macalline Art Center: The Cloister Project
For the exhibition “Riddle Our bodies,” Shao Chun phases an intimate encounter between a house and its new inhabitants: the artworks. Seizing on the condominium setting of the Macalline Artwork Heart’s Cloister Challenge, Shao distributes her newest sculptural installations all through your entire residence. Within the kitchen, the set up Tremendous Clear (all works 2022) pumps bubble foam beneath a cluster of entwined knots that endlessly rids itself of the accumulating residue. Within the close by examine, The Lure emits a discreet hum broadcast from mini digital units seeded in a nest of plastic pipes which were wrapped in lampshade frames and artificial hair. In the meantime, within the southern bed room, Artwork Chrysalid confronts viewers with what seems to be the wake of a rupture: Clear fluids drip down tentacular tubes, as mist spews from dangling sacks resembling oversize disposable bathe caps.
Because the “riddle” of the exhibition title suggests, maybe there’s another manner of perceiving these works. Smooth but malleable supplies like silicone, muslin, and tarpaulin mix with natural components like sea urchins and shells to counsel pores and skin each pure and manmade. Magnificence merchandise, together with false eyelashes, artificial hair, and make-up sponges, allude to shoppers’ need for a youthful-looking physique, whereas the sharp metals of fish hooks and metal wires current an underlying menace.
Shao’s Frankensteinian “physique specimens” recall to mind the artwork of Ivana Bašić and Mire Lee. Whereas the latter two artists use versatile substances to defy mounted varieties and the finitude of actuality, Shao’s works deal with the wrestle of escape (a phenomenon that’s significantly related in our grueling pandemic period). A prisoner to each the encompassing setting and an interior turmoil, the physique in Shao’s sculptures slowly surrenders to feelings of loss, anxiousness, and concern, which morph and manifest into bodily wounds, seen from the surface.
Translated from Chinese language by Jy Deng.
— Wang Shuman
