Chisenhale Gallery presents Wasted Mud, the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Shanghai-based artist Yu Ji. Comprising sculpture, video, print and performance, Yu Ji’s work often responds to a specific context or location to examine the interplay between the human body and its surrounding space. To book please click here.
Motivated by an acute sensitivity to materials, Yu Ji’s work explores a tension between physical matter and energy. Recurring materials used in her work, such as cement, wood, metal, plastic and organic matter all have their distinctive characteristics, tactility and ‘temperatures’. In her installations, these materials oppose, rub and strike against one another; proposing by their proximity how they might merge, combine or absorb one into the other.
Influenced by research conducted during a residency at Delfina Foundation, London, in 2019, Yu Ji’s new commission sees London as a site to explore the body in relation to our built and natural environments. Taking her experience of the city’s canals and rivers as a starting point, Yu Ji’s installation acts as a ‘living sculpture’, where, through the use of water, Yu Ji alters the gallery’s seemingly fixed structure.
Building on Yu Ji’s ongoing series of fragmented concrete torsos, the exhibition includes two new concrete sculptures depicting bodies bound and moulded together, one contained within plaster and wood. Influenced by the birth of her first child, this new series of sculptures comments on human interdependence, exchange and transformation.
| Duration | 22 May 2021 - 18 July 2021 |
| Times | Wednesday to Sunday, 12 – 6pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Chisenhale Gallery |
| Address | 64 Chisenhale Road, London, E3 5QZ |
| Contact | 020 8981 4518 / mail@chisenhale.org.uk / www.chisenhale.org.uk |