Current
Where Shall I Go?
Traces of Evaporated Wings
Ten of Cups plus
to contain stardust
weaving fragments (After “Frantumaglia”)
Curation
Meandering, Spiraling, Unraveling
Flower no Flower
Book
Bio
Contact
Artists: Yuhan Hu, Daedalus Li, Weihui Lu
Venue: Accent Sisters (150 Bay Street, Jersey City, NJ)
On view: September 14th, 2024 - October 12th, 2024
Press Release
Yes, I want the last word which is also so primary that it gets tangled up with the unattainable part of the real. I'm still afraid to move away from logic because I fall into instinct and directness, and into the future. Then it's the future, and any hour is your allotted hour. So what's the harm of moving away from logic?
—Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
Reason cannot seize the unconceptualizable, but can only pretend to have grasped it through sublime experience or through postulates in practical reason.
—Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics
It is tempting to hope the newer the better. Whether the latest technical or institutional framework, the logic to them hasn’t changed much ever since Western industrialization. The extraction and appropriation of nature and human beings as resources, augmented by technological advancement, have seamlessly merged with how we produce and consume text, images and the body.
Meandering, Spiraling, Unraveling disrupts the hegemonic narrative on technology and knowledge production from the perspective of image production, natural landscape and cultural identity. The exhibition focuses on improvisation as an embodiment practice, in lieu of extractivism. Rather than suggesting a systematic change, the exhibition invites the audience to engage with the question of how a non-calculative and non-instrumentalizing relationship to the world might be, and how healing and restoration might be possible through critical self-knowledge.
Inserting a bodily touch upon the narrative time within camera apparatus is integral to Yuhan Hu’s work. By assembling photograph(s), text, and found objects, her sculpture holds together fragments that capture an ephemeral sensation of the present moment, one that will disappear into the next instant. In Rosa, sequential photographs from video recordings of everyday life—whether of a swan swimming on a lake, walking toward a tree, or observing the sky—are transferred onto found wood sheets. These surfaces, infused with overlooked past moments, are delicately joined together, embracing the material’s fragility rather than altering it. In her own words, the endurance of the wooden surfaces depends on "each other." The use of sequential images is also evident in Please let me die for you and What could've been what would've been what was what will it be?. To her, the difference between each frame is so insignificant that it is easily overlooked, much like the apologue of the boiling frog, where the frog is unaware of the danger as the cold water gradually heats to a boiling temperature.
In Weihui Lu’s work, the trace of time is a palpable element. Dreaming of Home in Hameenkyro is a print from one of the linoleum blocks she carved while on residency in Finland. Rather than photographing her walks, she embraced the slow process of linocut, carving out scenes of the landscape after taking long daily walks in the snow. The resulting image embodies a connection to the landscape rooted in body and space, offering a contrast to the experience of landscape mediated through technology. Her recent installation Tarim invites viewers to directly situate oneself in the god-like aerial perspective of landscapes only possible through drones, planes and satellites. The viewer immediately sees an aerial view image of the Tarim Basin, a site for a new oil extraction project in China, printed on meshed fabric. Looking downward, the viewer discovers a mirror, where both a hand-carved relief image of the National Oil Reserves in Alaska on the reverse side and one's own reflection are visible. Through the installation, she questions how these images have shaped an extractive mentality inherent to the prevailing world order.
In a similar vein to Weihui, Daedalus Guoning Li’s work intertwine hands-on and digital mark-making, somatic writing, and libidinal energy, resonating with the time spent in their surrounding environment—whether engaging with the glossy surfaces of polymeric sheets or the walls, pipes, and corners of a room. In their recent prints, they began exploring a hybrid image-making process, moving between gestural painting and laser engraving. One of the resulting works, He Thought The Intelligence Transcended The Ruin Of The Body, is not only a material exploration but also a realization of a material metaphor, reflecting the conflicting relationship between appropriation’s misuse and illumination—an aspect inherent to the diasporic queerness of Chinese cultural identities—through the acts of layering and engraving. Similarly, in their site-specific performance iteration #2, they embody the material metaphor by conducting somatic writing on paper and transferring traces of the writing using Chinese painting lamination techniques, as if weaving a net to situate their body within the room.
Together, the exhibition offers an exploration of the significance of improvisation, emphasizing that it is not technology or institution in conflict with humans, but its prevailing narratives in reducing and erasing bodily experiences. While there is no single solution that fits all, one can let the journey unfold at their own pace—as the title of the exhibition suggests—meandering between infinite possibilities, spiraling and folding in on itself, until the final form, image, assemblage, or action is unraveled through a state of gradual realization (渐悟 jian wu) or sudden awakening (顿悟 dun wu).
Poster and Visual Identity Design: Daedalus Li
Photograph: Yuhan Shen (farfar studio)
Special Thanks: Jiaoyang Li, Kexun Zhang