Gentle Monuments: Chen Wei, Cui Jie, Yasmine Anlan Huang, Nabuqi, Guo-Liang Tan, Zhang Ruyi
Opening Reception: Thursday, 19 March, 5 – 7 pm
*The gallery will be temporarily closed from Tuesday, 24 March to Saturday, 28 March, and will reopen on Tuesday, 31 March.
Monuments are structures created to honor significant moments or individuals in history. Grand in scale, they symbolize the enduring weight of time and history. Firmly and quietly, monuments observe the growth of cities and the passage of generations. Made from durable materials such as stone, bronze, and concrete, permanence is solidly embedded in their material and form.
As artists turn to textiles and pliable materials to create objects that are adaptable and open to transformation in this exhibition, their fragility, exposed seams and softness invite repair and continued negotiation. What results is a process of commemoration, history, memory and valuation that is continuously reinterpreted.
A few drawn lines on paper, broken glass, and a table tennis paddle repurposed from cardboard are part of Chen Wei’s (b.1980) evolving installations. Chen explores the concept of a "temporary theater" through makeshift objects and environments. Objects are moved and transformed within constructed spaces until they are frozen in time by the camera, capturing a fleeting moment that condenses grand narratives into something more immediate and transient.
Cui Jie (b.1983) has long examined urban architecture and the visual language of modernism. She dissects symbols of power and imagery embedded in urban expansion, transforming monumental architecture into psychologically charged spatial propositions. “Ceramic Deer and the BIDC building, Lomé”, the landmark financial architecture of West African cities is abstracted into striated patterns, interlaced with the household ceramic deer form that proliferated in China during the late Reform and Opening-up period. The antlers blossom like vines, spreading through the concrete grid of the financial edifice—their lustrous Eastern texture resembling fissures where softness permeates rigid order.
Working with everyday urban materials—cement, ceramic tiles, plastic film, and construction debris, Zhang Ruyi (b.1985) uses “reality” itself as a method for reorganizing space. “Wandering Corner” transforms a familiar architectural threshold into a spatial structure. Positioned horizontally and occupying a corner, it compresses multiple spatial possibilities while contradicting the door’s original function. The unstable assemblage of plants, pipes, steels and construction debris reminds us of the underlying desires that drives the development of any city, shaping how individuals see, perceive and interact with their surroundings. The void framed by the sculpture also hints at overlaps or intrusions between public and private space. Zhang’s recurring cactus motif—hard and prickly on the outside, tender within, and slow-growing— also serves as a metaphor for coexistence, reflecting a delicate negotiation between self and city.
Nabuqi's (b.1984) “Peeper No.1” reimagines the relationship between the body and objects through appropriation and reconfiguration. At first glance, the sculpture appears to be a simple floor lamp, functional in nature. However, upon closer inspection, the lamp transforms into an intricate, decorative object, its shades composed of fragmented, easily accessible images. This blending of function and form fosters a simultaneous act of viewing and using, creating a deeper, more intimate connection between the body and object.
Guo-Liang Tan (b. 1980) presents a series of paintings on semi-transparent aviation fabric. Diluted pigment seeps, lingers and settles across the waterproof surface, allowing gravity and time to shape the image. Color diffuses and coagulates within the fibers, and the traces of folding and unfolding are left behind, these marks becoming inscriptions of time itself. Commemoration does not appear as an image, but as a slow accumulation, held within the memory of the material.
By combining autobiography, fiction, archival text, everyday objects and performance, Yasmine Anlan Huang (b.1996) constructs polyphonic narratives that explores personal vulnerability and broader ideological systems, innocence and violence, the looming past and the immediate present. “dear velocity” revisits the now-demolished "Space Wonder" amusement park (航天奇观) in Huang’s hometown, Guangzhou. Once home to a replica of the Space Shuttle Atlantis and a monumental spaceship—icons of an era defined by aspirations for technology, the future, and globalization. Crowdfunded by local farmers, the park embodied collective dreams and a hopeful embrace of globalization during China’s reform era, a period of rapid change. How can we reinterpret and preserve the hopes once embodied by ruins and monuments?
“Gentle Monuments” embodies a tension that could be described as monumental yet gentle. While minimal in scale, it casts a glance at personal and collective histories, urbanization and the built environment, transformation and appropriation. It probes us to consider who or what is typically depicted by monuments, and why some stories are valued over others.
