Shanghai Art021 上海廿一当代艺术博览会
Yiwei Gallery was pleased to participate in the 13th edition of Art021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. We presented works by seven artists at the main booth. Meanwhile, Planting Texts, a collaborative installation by Nina K. Ekman and Mao Mao, were featured in the BEYOND section of the fair.
The modernity of life heavily relies on structures, institutions, and evidence. We have been too rusty with our perception of the unmediated state of things. If an event is not filmed or transcribed—did it really happen? If a thought is not captured through language—does it truly exist?
In Nurturing Textuality, Norwegian artist Nina K. Ekman and Chinese artist Mao Mao invite the audience to reflect on these questions. The work attempts to restore nature’s own way of recording existence—unconscious, unintentional, and untouched by the interference of will.
Inspired by the folding screens found in Suzhou gardens, the installation’s spatial arrangement enables the viewers to wander and encounter shifting perspectives. Ekman’s contribution consists of six embroidered and dyed depictions of Carnegiea gigantea (saguaro cactus). Using fibers collected from nature, she traces the cactus’s life cycle, growth, endurance, collapse, and decay, as a kind of text written without human grammar.
In front of the installation stands Mao Mao’s golden sculpture, derived from a piece of paper unconsciously crumpled by hand. The folds of paper are the purest traces left by touch—unmediated by language, formed instead by instinctive muscle memory, and bearing a kind of embodied text. Though there are no words upon it, each crease and pressure records the body’s state at that instant. By casting these fleeting forms in gold, the artist preserves them as lasting monuments—like indecipherable inscriptions of history.
