Allison Katz’s “Artery” was what could be called an art critic’s dream. Three reviews had already appeared by the time I got to it a few weeks after it opened—from Sydney via Heathrow, jet-lagged and disoriented. Somehow, though, the writers seemed to miss important elements of the exhibition, which consisted of thirty confounding paintings, ceramics, and prints, all representational but in a variety of styles. It went unremarked that the works had clearly been made to fit precisely into the two large rooms of Camden Art Centre in which they were displayed; the fact that turned out to be crucial.

Over the past few years, Yu Ji invited men to her studio to pose for her, asking them to test the limits of their bodies—to strain, to exhaust themselves, to go perhaps beyond their physical capacities—as she observed. Boredom, fatigue, entropy, meditation, transformation, transcendence: How might these states manifest in sculpture? Later, from memory, she molded their taut limbs and striving torsos in clay, using the studies to make resin molds, which she filled with concrete.

Alongside other mixed-media works, nine of these concrete bodies—none of them whole—were scattered throughout Ji’s recent