Nabuqi

Nabuqi’s exhibition “Ghost, Skin, Dwelling” takes over Sifang Art Museum’s off-site space in Shanghai, a two-hundred-square-meter roughcast apartment on the third floor of a residential building. In the daytime, the room seems filled only with sunlight; the walls are naked, the windows uncurtained. The artist has erected four low partitions to carve up the otherwise open floorplan. In essence, it is an imitation of an apartment within a real apartment, a theater of sculpted objects.

The domestic theme is of course all too common in the time of Covid-19. Maybe that’s why I feel myself sigh a little upon seeing the bronze casts of twisted lamps. Titled Fossil and all created in 2021, they look like a kind of houseplant or maybe human bodies composed of the bare minimum of muscle and bone. Unable to give light, they exist in perfect silence, and yet they carry a life force, offering a glimpse of what we call the human condition.

Alongside these unlit lamps are a series of “gears,” titled “Peeper,” 2021, which do give light. To create these, the artist mounted bulbs on simple metal structures covered with cloth inkjet-printed with kitschy nature scenes. The works play across the boundaries of the real and its representations, creating sets of mini-landscapes that strike me as positively funny in this ruinlike apartment.

Together—and partially because of the aesthetic filter of their setting—the works craft a certain kind of decadent poem on the freshly-branded “post-” stage of mass expansion and consumption in a megacity shaped by its XXL real-estate economy, while, on the other hand, the restraint under the surface of the works and the gaping emptiness of the spaces between them will perhaps inspire speculation on the coexistence of image and object, the real and the virtual.