This exhibition made me cry like a dog behind the gauze

The new exhibition "Hu Xiaoyuan: Off the Beaten Track" opens at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, on January 24, 2025. This is Chinese artist Hu Xiaoyuan's first solo museum exhibition in Hong Kong, featuring seven groups of 12 works, all newly commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary. Hu Xiaoyuan (born 1977, Harbin) rose to international prominence in 2007 as the first Chinese female artist to participate in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Over the past two decades, she has established a compelling presence in the Chinese contemporary art scene. She now brings her unique vision to Hong Kong, revisiting her life experiences as a woman through installations, sound, painting, video, and literary creation. In her distinctive visual narratives, the artist uses biological remains and architectural ruins, combined with traditional sculptural materials such as metal and stone, interweaving natural knowledge, historical records, and literary metaphors. The exhibition will be held on the first floor of the JC Contemporary at Tai Kwun from January 24 to April 13, 2025. As part of Tai Kwun Contemporary's "Breach" series, "Hu Xiaoyuan: Off the Beaten Track" will be shown concurrently with "Alicia Kwade: Para-topias" and "Maeve Brennan: The Goods," with exhibitions by the three female artists exploring material and narrative in diverse ways, reflecting Tai Kwun's commitment to promoting contemporary art and deepening public understanding of it. The exhibition "Off the Beaten Track" explores the relationship between the individual and the collective in poetic and visual ways, attempting to present how individuals exist and make choices in a broken and dysfunctional contemporary society. Continuing her consistent style of using long-neglected objects, Hu Xiaoyuan focuses on the discards of social and biological systems: old rebar from urban demolition, used everyday utensils, dried fruit, empty beehives, dried insect wings, and even the remains of marine life. In Hu Xiaoyuan's eyes, whether organic or inorganic, from large urban buildings to tiny everyday objects, or from herself to all things in the world, each has its own life trajectory. She rearranges, juxtaposes, and combines these seemingly unrelated and defunct materials, and then examines their meaning through literature and history. Tai Kwun's rebirth from a historical monument to a cultural hub coincides with the artist's process of breathing new life into alternative narratives embedded in overlooked things. Echoing Tai Kwun's place in the tide of history, her work prompts us to consider how the past continues to shape the present and how discarded objects can give birth to new possibilities. The exhibition provides a space for contemplation, focusing on the nuances of everyday life. In a space-time meticulously crafted with gauze and light, Hu Xiaoyuan tells stories and reflections on evolution and destiny, mutation and exile, confinement and freedom, community and individuality. One of the exhibition's most distinctive features is the use of translucent gauze made of "xiao" (raw silk) to create different visitor pathways in the exhibition hall. Through specially designed artificial lighting and its subtle changes, a unique sense of space-time is created. Xiao, or raw silk, is the most primitive form of silk, soft, fragile, and translucent. Beneath the beautiful and soft form of xiao lies the little-known process of silk extraction. First, the cocoons are heated and steamed to kill the silkworms inside, preventing them from damaging the silk fibroin chains when they emerge. Then, the cocoons are soaked in hot water to soften the glue and loosen the fibers, which are finally twisted together during the reeling process to obtain raw silk. Formed in a process of gentleness and violence, wholeness and incompleteness, life and death, xiao embodies Hu Xiaoyuan's years of reflection on materials and metaphors. Xiao exists in the exhibition not only in the form of gauze curtains but is also repeatedly used by Hu Xiaoyuan to attach, cover, and wrap her works. The use of xiao represents her unique perspective on material selection, interweaving the biological, historical, and literary narratives behind the materials with observations of her own destiny. By blending various materials, the artist creates a unique on-site experience and revelation. One of the most striking works in the exhibition is the sculpture "Wreath on the Wasteland, or, Wasteland on the Wreath," inspired by the poem "Corona" by the Jewish German poet Paul Celan. In this work, Hu Xiaoyuan places dysfunctional organic materials such as paper mulberry bark, raw silk reeled from silkworm cocoons, wool, skeletons made of corn fiber, dried beehives, and fruit within a space constructed from discarded urban rebar and polished space aluminum. The stark visual conflict between the different materials reflects the individual fate and spatiotemporal encounters of each object, echoing the metaphor in Celan's "Corona": "Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand:/we are friends./From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:/time returns to the shell." (translated by Hsieh Hsu-sheng) The work "I Have Roots, But I Am Adrift" is quiet and fragile, also using space aluminum plates and old rebar to construct a space resembling a study. In one corner of the study hangs a short biography written by the artist in a semi-classical Chinese style. The table below is scattered with various seashells, dragonfly wings, cicada wings, wool, and other materials. These are either parts of organisms or remnants of the evolutionary process of life, all symbolizing fragments of life and memory. Through these carefully arranged materials, the artist echoes the story in the text, attempting to present her understanding of life's trajectory and changes in a visual and sensory way. Some of the works in the exhibition continue Hu Xiaoyuan's artistic practice over the years. For example, "Wood/Second" began with the artist's "Wood" series of painting exercises from 2008. In this series, she covers old wooden boards with xiao, meticulously outlines the grain on the boards, and finally completely covers the wood grain with wood lacquer. With the repetition of this series of actions, the painted form of the wood grain is reborn on the xiao. The limit of life is also vitality—the wood grain on the xiao imitates the wood grain on the wooden board, while the wood grain on the wooden board also limits the painting. Through this painting process, the artist presents the relationship between reality and imitation, domination and liberation, in a contradictory way. This is both a reflection on artistic language and an understanding of life and time. In addition to the works in the exhibition hall, Hu Xiaoyuan has also created two large-scale outdoor works for Tai Kwun's "44 Square Meters" and "55 Square Meters" series, which will be exhibited concurrently at the Parade Ground. These two giant images focus on details of the installation works "Wreath on the Wasteland, or, Wasteland on the Wreath I" and "Carpel II" from the current exhibition "Hu Xiaoyuan: Off the Beaten Track" at Tai Kwun Contemporary. The two works together demonstrate the artist's unique choice of materials. Dr. Pi Li, the curator of this exhibition and Head of Arts at Tai Kwun, said: "Hu Xiaoyuan's work is clearly different from the Chinese art that people are accustomed to seeing. Seeking cultural and gender identity in grand narratives or expressing artistic concepts with visual symbols is not her creative orientation. She focuses more on observing and experiencing the nuances of everyday things and presenting them in an almost obsessive manner. With various found everyday materials, she takes philosophical speculation and the conflicts implicit in daily life as her starting point, and through the texture of materials, literary metaphors, and natural history observations, she reveals the ineffable contemporary life experience and sensory aesthetics. Hu Xiaoyuan represents a certain aspect of Chinese art." Ying Kwok, Senior Curator at Tai Kwun, said: "Hu Xiaoyuan's 'Off the Beaten Track' is not just an exhibition, but an immersive perceptual practice. With an extremely complex visual language—from material selection to spatial layout—she creates an artistic world that cannot be described in words or captured by photography. It is an artistic experience that requires us to slow down, feel with our bodies, and digest with our hearts. Each work is like a silent poem, inviting viewers to enter a deeper inner dialogue through their senses." Education and Public Programs During the exhibition, Tai Kwun Contemporary will host a series of public programs and educational activities to further explore the themes touched upon in the exhibition. These include Tai Kwun Talks, inviting the artist and special guests to further explore the artistic concepts related to the exhibition. Hu Xiaoyuan: Off the Beaten Track Curated by Pi Li and Wang Shuman January 24–April 13, 2025 (except January 29–30) Tuesday–Sunday 11am–7pm Closed Mondays (Open on public holidays, closed the following day) JC Contemporary, 1/F