Hu Xiaoyuan

The main hall of Hu Xiaoyuan’s latest exhibition is flooded with light. For her new sculptural works, she has nailed raw silk evenly across roughly textured wood and traced the wood grain on the silk with pencil. She then stabilized these delicate sculptural forms with steel or wooden brackets. The material sensitivity here enables in the viewer an appreciation of beauty in the amplification of small details. This sentiment captures the conceptual thrust of her entire exhibition.

In a darkened adjacent room, five LCD screens hang from the ceiling and loop the multichannel video The Character of Human Nature (all works cited, 2015). The first screen shows a close-up shot of a hand holding a needle while another hand holds a balloon at the nearest possible distance to the needle’s point. Owing to fear and the inability to hold still, the balloon ultimately bursts. This hand appears across the five screens, accomplishing different tasks such as drawing circles on opposite wrists, scribbling in a book, or sticking a hair on the wall. On a tiny screen in the farthest corner of the exhibition is Gentle and Painful Ripples. It features a performer in a black-and-white bodysuit standing in a pool of water, shaking. The genderless body kicks up waves; they become still, and after a prolonged pause, the water settles again before the action is repeated.

Throughout the show, Hu Xiaoyuan banishes viewers’ distracting thoughts and invites their focus by tidying up her forms and then disengaging from any formalist associations. In so doing, she strives to illustrate concepts removed from specific context. We can find intersubjectivity in her videos: how one body intends to interpret or judge another but unintentionally projects and intermingles. The entire exhibition thus becomes a training ground for a practice in looking that is guided by the artist’s notion of what we should and should not see.

Translated from Chinese by Lee Ambrozy.