Frieze London
2023/10/11 - 2023/10/15
The Regent’s Park
Frieze Viewing Room, London Edition
Online, 2023/10/4 - 2023/10/18
Focus sector
Booth H28
Ni Hao
Shi Jiayun
Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present artists Ni Hao and Shi Jiayun’s duo project at Frieze London, booth H28. Bringing forth new bodies of works, the two artists examine themes of boundary and bodily perception in the domestic setting through their respective practices, attempting to counteract the limitation of physical space.
In this presentation, Ni creates a series of freestanding sculptures sourced from industrial air filters, dotted by chrome auto letters and 3D printed elements. The erected sculptures extend the artist’s exploration of the grid systems perpetual in modern life and their highly regulative impact on the organic body. In Dedicatory Stele for You (2023), a tightly knitted filter structure presented in modular form serves as an example of the grid systems to interact with chrome letters scavenged by the artist from scrap yards, superimposing and juxtaposing the visible and invisible violence. Clashing and pressing the metal pieces into the soft filter grids, Ni transforms the sculptures into sites of tension, where the traces of exerted forces prevail on the disrupted grids. The repurposed chrome letters are then collaged into poems and engraved onto the stele-like combination of machine parts, evoking a Futuristic and monumental sentiment inspired by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s words-in-freedom poetry form. This romantic and almost cheesy textual information hints at the absence of the body, posing as a stark contrast to the mass-produced industrial units. Tainted by a layer of danger, Ni’s works consistently underscore the ambivalence within the persistent predicament of human existence, addressing an enduring process of self-inflicted violence and care.
Enveloping Ni’s sculpture works, the abstract paintings of Shi also investigate the sense of ambiguity rooted in our daily encounters within the domestic setting. In Pigeon (2023), the artist collages the familiar with the illegible, delineating an alternative perspective to interpret the mundane environment. The unusual viewing angle immediately subverts viewers’ viewing experiences and expectations, merging different pictorial planes into one single work. Such a way of working is recurrent throughout her art, where she would transcribe our daily experience of the disorderly into an intimate order. For this dual project, the artist employs a pointillist method to add a fuzzy effect on the canvas. In this work, the softened background of blue hues is unexpectedly interrupted by the sharp and hard edges of unidentifiable patches. Their substance and lack of thereof are simultaneously confronted by the attributed shadow, resulting in a cloudiness that ripples across the canvas. The overlapping sensibilities and viewing mechanisms revealed in Shi’s works unsettle the orderly structure purported by modern life, allowing diverse possibilities.
Conjointly, the presentation illuminates the artists’ poetic interventions of our daily experiences. While Ni reconstructs the colliding forces that govern our activities, revealing the oblivious, Shi deconstructs the visual elements essential to one’s grasp of certainty, redirecting our gaze to the abstracted alternatives. Through Ni and Shi’s artistic languages, the booth seeks to reflect on the familiar both on a micro and macro scale, responding to its contemporary context.
1.
Dedicatory Stele for You, 2023
Industrial HEPA air filters, harvested car letters and emblems, wood, steel, lard embedded textile, resin and flocking over 3d printed PETG plastic of photogrammetry 3D models, acrylic painted Paper mache, Fordite, feather, wasp nest, airsoft pallets on bone fragments, photographs, burnt papers using incense, burnt paper using high power handheld laser, artificial hair
139 x 69 x 69 cm
54 3/4 x 27 1/8 x 27 1/8 in
2.
Dedicatory Stele for Me, 2023
Industrial HEPA air filters, harvested car letters and emblems, wood, steel, lard embedded textile, resin and flocking over 3d printed PETG plastic of photogrammetry 3D models, acrylic painted Paper mache, Fordite, feather, wasp nest, airsoft pallets on bone fragments, photographs, burnt papers using incense, burnt paper using high power handheld laser, artificial hair
145 x 62 x 62 cm
57 1/8 x 24 3/8 x 24 3/8 in