29 Mar Territory
Source Credit: Content and images from Wall Street International Magazine by . Read the original article - https://www.meer.com/en/79829-territory
On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2024, Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers
are pleased to present territory, a group show of works by Mire Lee, Liu Yujia, Gala
Porras-Kim, Tan Jing, and Zhang Ruyi, curated by Shi-ne Oh. It will be Sprüth Magers’ first
group exhibition focusing exclusively on female Asian artists. The title, territory, naturally
associated with aggressive political policies and behaviours, questions the vast definitions
of borders and boundaries and how they both limit and liberate our transgressive desires
on physical as well as psychological terrain.
The five artists will transform all of the gallery’s spaces, premiering works that examine
the bounds of the body, disgust, and morality, and the restraints of language, history, and
memory. Diverse in media and approach, the artworks on view employ unpredictable
materials to engage and challenge viewers’ senses.
In the downstairs galleries, a literal division—a concrete wall produced especially for
the show—sets the stage for a body of work by Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá; lives
and works in Los Angeles and London). Her research-based practice considers the
relationship between cultural artefacts and the institutional conventions around registration,
conservation, and display. Untitled (Efflorescence) (2018/24) is a structure made with
concrete supersaturated with salt, which will gradually migrate to the surface, causing
its slow deterioration. The work references the use of natural processes of demolition
to bypass regulations for the historic preservation of buildings.
Installed close by, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing (2022/24)
examines the conditions and limits of conservation methodology: mould spores collected
from the British Museum’s storage are propagated in the gallery. A living object, the large-
scale work continues to change as the microorganisms and fungi grow. By displaying
the germinating microbes that have digested microscopic particles of ancient artefacts,
the viewer can witness the objects evolving into a new form. It is a return to their
pre-institutional natural course of decay, shifting the argument for repatriation from
a geographical traversal to an organic one.
Tan Jing (b. 1992, Shenzhen; lives and works in Guangdong) weaves reality, fiction, folklore,
and personal memory into narratives, which she combines with surprising materials
into multisensorial experiences. A distinct smell leads visitors to Tan Jing’s installation,
Floor Tiles and Flowers (2023), for which she blends various spices native to Thailand into
brittle plaster tiles that crumble underfoot. In their different states of fracture, the plaster
pieces speak to the fragility of memories and the complexity of diasporic family history.
The olfactory experience is completed by scattered fabric flowers that emit the fragrance
of Thai talcum powder and are arranged into floral garlands in The Souvenir II (2024).
Her video installation Nook of a Hazy Dream (2023) plays on four handmade glass panels
and follows Lap Hung, a fictional character grappling with his sense of identity after
remigrating from Thailand to China in 1956, paralleling the life of Tan Jing’s late grandfather.
Liu Yujia (b. 1981, Sichuan Province; lives and works in Beijing) presents three recent
video works exploring the Chinese frontier region of the Changbai Mountains, a place
steeped in complex geopolitical histories and extractive economies. Interested in the impact
of territorial borders imposed on nature, she turns her lens onto various social contexts.
In A Darkness Shimmering in the Light (2023), Liu Yujia weaves eco-fiction with drone
footage, 16-mm film, ethnography, and mythology to create a space where the political,
personal, and spiritual meet.
The black-and-white video Harvesting (2023) depicts diligent Korean women—ethnic
minority workers—silently picking cultivated wood ear fungi in the Chinese-North Korean
border region. Mushrooms (2023) features hypnotic close-ups of the boreal forests of
Northeast Asia set to an atmospheric underscore and the sound of birds chirping leaves
rustling, and branches snapping. Liu Yujia resists an anthropomorphic perspective as
the camera moves close to the ground or captures the papery gills of white mushrooms.
Fusing documentary and narrative storytelling, the work offers a captivating view of the
interactions between insects, spiders, trees, and fungi—a ballet of the undergrowth.
In the upstairs gallery, Mire Lee (b. 1988, Seoul; lives and works between Berlin and Seoul)
confronts the boundaries between the abject and the arousing. The visceral works, which
draw on scatology, are rooted in the uncomfortable. Composed of a mixture of organic
and synthetic materials such as cement, wood, silicone, oil, and clay, they centre around
the hole as a metaphoric motif.
From the cavernous concrete mixers of the kinetic sculpture Look, I’m a fountain of filth
raving mad with love (2022) comes a raucous noise as the machines slowly spin their
contents. The work’s title stems from a poem by Kim Eon Hee, who is known for her
brutal images of bodies and eroticism. The poet’s verses are written in grey concrete
in three languages—Korean, English, and German—across a gallery wall, interrupted
by pockmark-shaped sculptures. Elsewhere, Mire Lee indicates the body in absentia;
a ceramic sculpture’s structure, its bulges, gaping holes, and cracks suggest—with a
blasé morbidity—dried entrails. Addressing fear, violence, trauma, and mental breakdown,
her noisy and distinct-smelling installation defies taboos and explores art as an intensely
physical experience.
In the gallery’s Window, Zhang Ruyi (b. 1985, Shanghai; lives and works in Shanghai)
examines China’s accelerated urbanization in the 1990s, interrogates the contradictions
of city life, and reimagines public space. Her sculptures and paintings are based on
common construction materials found in large cities, such as cement, tile, plastic film,
graph and grid paper, and detritus from building sites. Employing the cactus as a central
image, the works explore the tension and coexistence between the organic and the
inorganic.
Take Submerged Landscape (2019), an aquarium that contains two identical
concrete cacti sculptures, each skewered with two pieces of rebar, and two suckermouth
catfish that swim in the artificial environment. Over time, the water causes erosion and
moss growth on the objects’ surfaces. In other places, the prickly plants thrive despite
the inhospitable conditions: cement cacti grow out of cement PVC pipes in Modern Fossil
(Pipe)-3 (2022–23) and Perishable Modernity-2 (2023), while Planter-5 (2018) and
Planter-8 (2022) have the desert flora’s spines sprouting on rubble.
Source Credit: Content and images from Wall Street International Magazine by . Read the original article - https://www.meer.com/en/79829-territory