The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 174 Flesh in stone – Anthropos II 2021 Cement, iron rod / 70 x 110 x 55cm / Courtesy: The artist, Edouard Malingue, Hong Kong and Sadie Coles HQ, London Forager – sleeping pill 2020 Steel bathtub with metal frame / Bathtub: 72 x 150 x 73cm; frame: 65 x 130 x 66cm / Courtesy: The artist, Edouard Malingue, Hong Kong and Sadie Coles HQ, London In her textured evocations of the fragility of the human form, Yu Ji seeks to unravel the dynamic relationship between bodies and the spaces they move through and inhabit. Her works range from configurations of intriguing sculptural objects to physically challenging performances undertaken in natural environments. Inspired by ‘the ebb and flow of the feminine cycles of decay’ expressed in the work of German-American postminimalist sculptor Eva Hesse, Yu Ji places particular emphasis on the variance of surfaces, both in the construction of her sculptures and in the choice of materials on display. 1 Recurring motifs include cascading arrangements of wax, refigured building materials scavenged from demolition sites, and fragmentary, ambiguously gendered torsos cast from concrete. Her installation for APT10 is composed of three major elements: a figurative torso ( Flesh in stone – Anthropos II 2021), an array of objects on an off-kilter table ( Forager – vegetarian 2021) and a truncated bathtub ( Forager – sleeping pill 2020). Yu Ji has suggested that, in combination, the three components create a kind of portrait referencing domestic routines, particularly mealtimes, cleaning and rest. In part, these derive from the intensified experience of home life shared throughout the world during lockdowns mandated by the global COVID-19 pandemic. As the mother of a young child, and as an artist accustomed to working site- specifically rather than remotely, Yu Ji has attested to feeling this intensity acutely. The torso is life-sized, posed awkwardly half- seated, half-recumbent, its soft fleshy lines cast from cut-price concrete in the artist’s signature style. The table, designed and built by Yu Ji, holds a host of found and crafted objects — handmade glassware, fruits and vegetables both real and cast — that appear to have been left as they stand in the middle of a determined process, be it the creation of an artwork, the preparation of a meal, or some kind of scientific experiment. The tub, scavenged from a demolition site in a regional city, is of a style popular in China in the 1980s; one end is sawn off, and the whole apparatus is tilted so that any liquid would gather at the opposite end. The choice of forms and materials resonates with broader themes in Yu Ji’s practice. Her work often turns on the intersection in art and life of varying types of matter, which might be differentiated along the lines of the three domains — animal, vegetable and mineral — and the points at which such distinctions are obscured. In an essay published during the height of the pandemic, Yu Ji reflected on the experience of climbing toward the Parthenon in Athens, recalling the agave plants that lined the path, scored and peeled by the passage of hordes of tourists, their spines equally capable of prickling and scratching human skin. 2 At the same time, she observed in classical sculpture the contrast between the sinewy lines of male bodies rendered in stone, and softer representations of the female figure into the ideal of wife and mother — one a public display of athleticism and excellence, the other constrained to a far more private realm. Acknowledging the hard-fought rights to participate in the public sphere that women have attained over the past century — rights that remain incomplete — Yu Ji asks how the division of gender can be overcome. Flesh in stone – Anthropos II is one of a series of sculptures in which the artist seeks to symbolically blur gender lines, placing masculine forms into feminine poses, or pressing male organs onto female figures. Although utterly mineral in composition, the work’s organic lines — its semblance to humanity — render it the centrepiece of her installation, a body that eats, sleeps and bathes like the rest of us, in readiness to leave the house and participate in the world at large. Reuben Keehan Endnotes 1 Yu Ji, ‘Artist’s artists: Eva Hesse’, Frieze Masters , vol. 7, 27 August 2018, <https://www.frieze.com/article/yu-ji-eva-hesses- experimentsmaterial-and-form>,viewed July 2021. 2 Yu Ji, ‘Tongues of Lykavittos’, Heichi , 9 July 2020, <hsttp://www. heichimagazine.org/en/articles/91/tongues-of-lykavittos> , viewed July 2021. Yu Ji Born 1985, Shanghai, China Lives and works in Shanghai