Wasted Mud
Chisenhale Gallery, London
22 May – 18 July, 2021
Press release
Installation view, 2021
Comprising sculpture, video, print and performance, Yu Ji’s work often responds to a specific context or location to examine the interplay between the human body and its surrounding space. The artist presents “Wasted Mud”, her first institutional show in the UK, at Chisenhale Gallery.
Motivated by an acute sensitivity to materials, Yu Ji’s work explores a tension between physical matter and energy. Recurring materials used in her work, such as cement, wood, metal, plastic and organic matter all have their distinctive characteristics, tactility and ‘temperatures’. In her installations, these materials oppose, rub and strike against one another; proposing by their proximity how they might merge, combine or absorb one into the other.
Influenced by research conducted during a residency at our partners Delfina Foundation, in 2019, Yu Ji’s new commission sees London as a site to explore the body in relation to our built and natural environments. Taking her experience of the city’s canals and rivers as a starting point, Yu Ji’s installation acts as a ‘living sculpture’, where, through the use of water, Yu Ji alters the gallery’s seemingly fixed structure.
Installation view, 2021
Flesh in Stone-Rema Rema 2001, 2020
Building on Yu Ji’s ongoing series of fragmented concrete torsos, the exhibition includes two new concrete sculptures depicting bodies bound and moulded together, one contained within plaster and wood. Influenced by the birth of her first child, this new series of sculptures comments on human interdependence, exchange and transformation.
Hung from the gallery walls and and hovering just above the floor is Jaded Ribs (2019-2021), a large handmade net filled with recycled wreckage from local construction sites in Tower Hamlets, alongside objects from the artist’s studio in Shanghai. Ten plastic tubes connected to a self-regulating electronic water pump, slowly leaks plant-infused water throughout the gallery space, altering the exterior of her sculptures and seeping liquid into the building’s floor.
Wasted Mud develops Yu Ji’s ongoing enquiry into a symbiotic relationship between her body and specific terrains and contexts in which she works. By transforming the gallery into a site under construction, where what is considered debris reveals its potential for hidden vitality, Yu Ji’s new body of work exposes our reliance upon one another and renews focus on the spaces that contain and sustain us.
Jaded Ribs, 2019-2021
Jaded Ribs, 2019-2021 (detail)
? Yu Ji is also part of the choral exhibition INCORPOREA at BASEMENT ROMA, presenting her series Flesh in Stone and the video PATAAUW STONE for the first time in Rome.
Yu Ji
Wasted Mud
Chisenhale Gallery, London
22 May – 18 July, 2021
CREDITS
All images Courtesy: the artist and Chisenhale Gallery, London
Photo: Andy Keate