ART-PRESENTATION: Yu Ji-Wasted Mud
A revisitation of sculpture, an extension of its three dimensionality and attunement to body, context and narrative, is at the heart of Yu Ji’s practice. Her work, that spans installation, video and performance, exists as a series of interventions, both into space and creating it, taking medium and materiality as a starting point. Creating her own language, Yu Ji enlivens her visual sentences with a rich vocabulary rooted in form, objects, humanity and the everyday.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Chisenhale Gallery Archive
Yu Ji presents “Wasted Mud”, her first solo exhibition in a UK institution, comprising sculpture, video, print and performance, Yu Ji’s work often responds to a specific context or location to examine the interplay between the human body and its surrounding space. Motivated by an acute sensitivity to materials, Yu Ji’s work explores a tension between physical matter and energy. Recurring materials used in her work, such as cement, wood, metal, plastic and organic matter all have their distinctive characteristics, tactility and “temperatures.” In her installations, these materials oppose, rub and strike against one another; proposing by their proximity how they might merge, combine or absorb one into the other. In 2013, the artist utilized dust in an improvised performance with her collaborator Yan Jun at Art Space, Shanghai. Yu’s actions in “Deep in the Cloud” were to throw bags of dry cement so that particles would float into the air, covering the entire room (and the audience), while Yan’s manipulation of electronic sound sustained their levitation through a configuration of upward-facing speakers. Influenced by research conducted during a residency at Delfina Foundation, in 2019, Yu Ji’s new commission sees London as a site to explore the body in relation to our built and natural environments. Taking her experience of the city’s canals and rivers as a starting point, Yu Ji’s installation acts as a “living sculpture,” where, through the use of water, Yu Ji alters the gallery’s seemingly fixed structure.In preparation for the London exhibition, the artist initiated a field research into the vicinity where Chisenhale is located, with a particular interest in the remaining wild and uncultivated areas around the canals and waterways.2 She was interested in how to internalize this flux of natural elements—elements that are normally peripheral to the experience of the audience inside the gallery. Yu looks to nurture these relationships into a language of abstraction honed from her experience living in Shanghai, a place where, depending on the area, buildings are already either in a state of decay and/or immediately surrounded by the accelerated growth of other structures. Here, the evocation of “mud,” an impure body of earth and water, connects to Yu’s gravitation toward self- effacing materials and their undifferentiated potential to yield new possibilities. Waste, memory, smell, and other atmospheric effects become mediums to express fluctuations in the environment in relation to the nature of our bodies. Building on Yu Ji’s ongoing series of fragmented concrete torsos, the exhibition includes two new concrete sculptures depicting bodies bound and moulded together, one contained within plaster and wood. Influenced by the birth of her first child, this new series of sculptures comments on human interdependence, exchange and transformation. Hung from the gallery walls and hovering just above the floor is “Jaded Ribs” (2021), a large handmade net filled with recycled wreckage from local construction sites in Tower Hamlets, alongside objects from the artist’s studio in Shanghai. Ten plastic tubes connected to a self-regulating electronic water pump, slowly leaking plant-infused water throughout the gallery space, alter the exterior of her sculptures and seep liquid into the building’s floor. A version of “Flesh in Stone” (2012- ), a series of figurative sculptures, will make an appearance in the London show. Each year, Yu has been molding clay with her hands, recalling archaeological fragments of ancient bodies, whose torsos and limbs contort and extend themselves into a static choreography of gestures. Another suspension occurs in “Etudes-Lento IV” (2017-19), this time with pine resin, a secretion that normally flows after tree damage. The artist sees this work as a spatial composition that lasts until the resin coagulates, with metal chains used as its hanging structure. The time and gesture of the performance elongates until the moment turpentine in the resin evaporates midair to a fixed form.
Photo: Yu Ji, Still Life 5, 2013, Green Hair Monster, commission project in 11th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, Courtesy: the artist
Info: Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Road, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 22/5-18/7/2021, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 12:00-18:00, https://chisenhale.org.uk/
