Curated by Bonnie Clearwater
Anne Chu’s work trucks in archetypes and symbols—the Knight, Bear, and Courtly Lady—but her often life-size sculptures always retain a tantalizing spark of ambiguity that forestalls easy conclusions: Are her spooky marionettelike figures derived from Tang dynasty China or from medieval Europe? Do they bode ill or well? Are they even human? MoCA’s exhibition of thirty-five sculptures and thirty works on paper from 1998 to the present is the most in-depth presentation to date of Chu’s work. Deftly carved in wood, cast in paper, wrought in gorgeous fabrics and other materials, her hybrid forms are easily among the most engaging figurative sculptures around. But please don’t call them puppets.
