Fairs
Liste Art Fair Basel
2022
Ni Hao
The Lathery Enfold
Booth 9
Dates_ June 13–19, 2022
Venue_ Messe Basel, Hall 1.1
2022
Ni Hao
The Lathery Enfold
Booth 9
Dates_ June 13–19, 2022
Venue_ Messe Basel, Hall 1.1
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Gallery Vacancy is pleased to announce artist Ni Hao’s solo project The Lathery Enfold at Liste Art Fair Basel, on view from June 13–19, 2022. Continuing Ni’s investigation of systemic mechanisms that regulate the societal bodies, The Lathery Enfold elicits a profound intimacy that existed in these prescribed rules of being, specifically revealing in the devices of the gridded system and language. Throughout his engagement with mass-produced materials commonly found in the domestic setting including IKEA racks, humidifiers, and graphic t-shirts, the artist seeks to allegorize the tension between human beings and the environment, illuminating the latent violence exerted by individualism, consumerism, and anthropocentrism via a series of wall-mounted and freestanding sculpture works.
Resulting from an inward examination of the home, the Grid series identifies an intimate yet vulnerable relationship between the body and the bathroom space, meanwhile scrutinizing bodily rituals popularized under capitalist consumerism. Epitomized in sculptural forms, the series merges the handmade scented soap with mass-produced IKEA racks, colliding an amorphous organic substance with a standardized industrial object. As a quintessential household item, the soap in Ni’s work serves not only as a metaphorical extension of the living entity but also a device of affirmation of the body’s livelihood. The portrayed state of soap, compressed, molded, and shaped by an external structure, alludes to numerous oblivious structures and systems imposed by human beings to regulate the body, catering to the capitalist agenda of efficiency and productivity. Scrubbed, scraped, and dissolved, the soap and the body hold a curious relationship in which each scrupulous interaction purported by hygiene seems to be at the cost of our living environment. Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, the habituating act of handwashing prompts an urgent reflection on the socialization of personal hygiene since modernity; the exhaustive effort committed to cleansing inevitably underwrites a detrimental compromise for the maintenance of the clean and proper body. Underneath the pristine outlook of the sculpture, the artist oftentimes conceals a layer of self-inflicting violence that is perpetual and pervasive in our daily lives. The sensibility of the bathroom space and the organic body is further captured through the ephemeral steam portrayed in Halitus X 5000 (2022) and Spiritus X 4000 (2022). In these works, Ni transforms the conveyor belt system into a water calligraphy machine: the built-in humidifier diffuses steam to enable images to develop on the looping gridded practice paper. While again a formless organic body is regulated by a modular structure, the works nonetheless address the Sinophone experience of perennial calligraphy practice. The ritualistic calligraphy practice and the omnipresent smart home appliances in the contemporary households are both evidence of an internalized embracement of an idealized middle-class lifestyle, whereas regulation, order, and control manifested through these objects and activities contain a permanent stature that Ni deliberately sets off against the temporally revealed Futuristic drawings on the looping grids. The cyclical process of water calligraphy obliterates an exit or result, accentuating the transient body entrapped in this preordained mediating form. The temporal yet invisible body is foregrounded in the group of freestanding works scattering around the central space of the booth. In these sculptures, the artist employs locally sourced mass-produced graphic t-shirts from Hsinchu as the primary material. The misspelled lettering on the t-shirts provokes a particular sensation in the viewer: while one experiences the transposed letter effect reading the printed text, one quickly comes to realize that any attempt to interpret the meaning is futile. Indebted to globalization, the cheaply manufactured clothing manipulates internet-found designs by partially copying and pasting to avoid copyright infringement, which simultaneously echoes the Engrish phenomenon widely seen in Asian countries. Coincidentally, the free-flowing nonsensical texts over the wearing bodies forge a mischievous link to Dadaism with the incorrect and ungrammatical combination of words. The hollowing shells that create silhouettes to indicate absent human beings and animals serve purposefully as a means to enunciate the invisible forces, which communicate with and activate the static Grid series enveloping the central space. Drawing on a similar metaphor, the sculptures animate the form-fitting bounds and limits imposed on the organic body. The Lathery Enfold probes into the oblivious systems underlying our everyday engagement from an Asian perspective, borrowing the aesthetics and virtues of modernity. The series of works slice through a myriad of complex and intriguing aspects across materiality, form, and aesthetics to unveil the intricacy of violence disguised under an appearance of neat, tidy, and benevolent. Bearing these paradoxical states in mind, the artist consciously puts his works in dialogue with the formalist constraints developed throughout modern art history, whereas titillating and repurposing the standardized tools with a hint of irony. In Ni’s poetic endeavors, his artworks meticulously sift through the mundane details of living, strip it down to the essential systems, and accurately pinpoint the danger in beauty and norm. |
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