Yu Ji ’s rapid rise to fame in the art world demonstrates a
desire for renewal by the world’s leading curators and gallerists. The Shanghai-based artist is currently on display at London’s prestigious
Chisenhale Gallery with a solo show that will go down as her first exhibition outside Asia. Yu Ji was born in 1985 in Shanghai, where he received his master's degree in sculpture from the Fine Art College of Shanghai University in 2011. His
explosion onto the global art scene , however, only came to pass years later, after his participation in the
Venice Biennale in 2019. Sculptures from his "
Flesh in Stone " series were displayed in the fair's central pavilion, and a specific installation took over the satellite events with suspended iron chains coated in resin, which appeared to be frozen in time and space. After that, major galleries around the world requested visits to her studio. Today, her work is touring the world: in addition to the show in London, Yu Ji is also the subject of a simultaneous solo exhibition at the
West Bund Museum in Shanghai , presented in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, and has already been confirmed for the next
New Museum Triennial in New York .
But what makes Yu Ji's art so special?
Furthermore, at a time when the art market favors bright, figurative painting,
Yu Ji's work is the opposite . It has no intention of being decorative or clean: instead, it seeks to directly confront the tension between the worlds natural and urban, between varied media and materials, between the physical and the ethereal.
For the Chisenhale exhibition, titled "
Wasted Mud ," Yu Ji transformed the gallery into a kind of
paradoxical cavern between city and jungle . A large black net stretches across the space, sagging under the weight of piles of rubble collected on construction sites in east London. A nearby table displays a headless sculpture. Electronic pumps disperse water through tubes threaded around monitors, with some of the liquid leaking onto the floor. "The work really stood out," said
Margot Norton , curator of the upcoming New Museum Triennial. "I think the ideas she's exploring resonate and the techniques she uses are original. The work in Venice proposed something new that I hadn't seen before." seen before".
Jo-ey Tang , artist and former curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, explains: "
Testing limits is what Yu Ji does in her artistic practice : the limits of the body, the limits of memory, the limits of materials and the limits of which constitutes a series of works that span years,” she reflects. “Ultimately, Yu Ji is asking: how does art work, how does art live in real time?” Source: Artnet
