胶囊上海｜廖雯：接近坍塌的平衡

廖雯: 接近坍塌的平衡 Liao Wen: Almost Collapsing Balance

撰文 / 陈柏麒

Liao Wen 廖雯 | Almost Hysterical 几近癔狂 | 2020 | limewood, silicone, stainless steel 椴木、硅胶、不锈钢 | 40 x 105 x 45 cm

Wood-carving process 廖雯作品创作过程

Text / Chen Baiqi

In a recent conversation, Liao mentioned a new understanding of her body: due to her extensive woodwork, the skin on her fingers was peeling off. Gradually, her sense of tactility also fades, flattening her perception of surroundings, which allowed her to gain a new world experience once she regained her sense of touch. The puppets – a creative medium Liao Wen trained in – simplify the human body and expose their embedded distortions. What the artist encountered and what these lime trees and silicone have undergone with her seem to have been etched unadorned in the artworks’ details. 

A puppet made by Liao Wen 廖雯制作的木偶

The Women's Festival in ancient Greece known as Thesmophoria, the Adonia in Athens, and therapy for hysteria in Victorian England engendered this series of works. Liao Wen’s interest in these stories is partly rooted in the collective revelry of the present. For the artist, an inescapable experience in a sea of information in complete disorder began since the outbreak of the pandemic or perhaps prior during an extended time, when even she was unaware of its emergence. 

However, this is not exactly a criticism of the revelry, for the artist is more concerned with ritual's absence and vital importance. As a transient transcendence of time and space, rituals present the discomfort of unfulfilled desires and the opposition between the ideal and the body, thus providing participants with an intense experience of being in the world. In these three stories, we are presented with many aspects of ritual. They move away from self-soothing to an utter state of liminality by creating further anxiety and restlessness. In such a state, people discover their limits through revelry, achieving temporary balance through movement; and achieve transcendence that approaches eternity through pulsing balance. 

In these rituals, the artist focuses on the female body, passages of rituals, mythological origins and natural extracts. She digests and transforms these stories by taking a unique and proficient approach: she buries a fig tree, a symbol of rebirth and purity in wooden womb and ovaries; lays half-covered and half-hidden a silicon reproduction of decaying flesh customarily buried by Greek women a year prior to the ritual; and transforms tears of the goddess Maia into myrrh used to stimulate sexual desire during Adonia to form The Garden of Adonis, a sculpture standing on tiptoe. These transformed creations are often placed in a system of dynamic balance. The body made of lime wood still retains its human joints, which suggests the limits of movement and reveals a tension of stillness. Like revels in the ritual, the limitations become the focus in this "self-supporting" structure, providing a palpable physical and emotional experience at all times; with all efforts and even with gritted teeth. In this process, the artist initiates and completes the ritual again and again. In this sense, the exhibition and the artworks before us are relics of the ritual and its ongoing practice. Their existence implies the continuation of the ritual and that we remain between eternal desire and impotence. 

Liao Wen 廖雯 | Don’t Leave 别离 | 2020 | limewood, silicone, stainless steel 椴木、硅胶、不锈钢 | 90 x 54 x 28 cm

But even a viewer who does not know the three stories above can intuitively perceive that, in an equilibrium that is on the verge of collapse, the artist strives to find the courage and hope to counteract the dark conditions through her own limits and an undercurrent of forces. As a ritual of "collective liminality," it is indeed an outward manifestation of a kind of "disorder." People have to rely on rituals because they perceive the expression of disorder without understanding it. What is important here is not the stories with ritual practices or the artist’s retelling of them, but how and why she tries to articulate and express them even now when scientific positivism reigns. Can these rituals and myths, which are generally perceived as futile or false, still allow us to reconnect with ourselves and the world? 

The oppressed ancient Greek women, interpreted from the myth of Adonis, not only conveyed the tragic fate of the hero Adonis, but they also empathized with Maia, who was morally condemned to endless suffering. They understood a world does not necessarily follow the logic of causality from the king of Sephiroth’s innocence so that the myth and the rituals they performed engendered powers of complexity and vitality. The difference between fable and myth is that the former often has an ending, whereas the myths before "Death of God" never spoke of reason but presented a more diverse and dynamic world. The artworks in this exhibition should not be treated and considered as visual transformations of certain myths and rituals. If they were, they would become, as all myths are today, contained within an intellectual framework - a kind of "heliotheistic art" with distinct outlines. Today, we are accustomed to the idea that all narratives can form an axis and expression, just as we expect a "theme" and "meanings" from an artist's work and an art exhibition. Nevertheless, what matters is how these forgotten understandings and perceptions are rediscovered and re-emphasized through the artist's work and how our shared insecurity and hardship are transformed into a communal spirit of solidarity. 

On the eve of the exhibition, Liao Wen looks back on her creative process and says, "In these four gallery spaces, whether the works resort to ritual or embodiment, they all share a deeper, common primordial motive. They might be about love and hurt in relationships, or about motherhood, survival instincts, or passion." Perhaps, it is about an indelible sense of truth, as the myth once encouraged and as one regains perception from the details of constant creation. 

廖雯1994年出生于四川成都，现居住于深圳，2016年毕业于四川美术学院版画系，2019年从中央美术学院实验艺术学院取得硕士学位。

廖雯的艺术实践根植于对日常身体的感知，尝试以鲜活的雕塑语言叙说隐匿于身体内部的情感变化，其实践同时亦涉及表演和影像。早期研制木偶的经历，为她带来了雕塑创作的独特视角；作品时常复现身体局部与器官，体现出艺术家通过再现疼痛感来唤醒身体体悟的倾向。她近期的实践侧重于"仪式中的身体"这一主题，将悬置于冲突临界点的身心状态，外化为暂处于临时稳定状态的雕塑结构。

Liao Wen (b. 1994, China) currently lives and works in Shenzhen, China. She graduated from the printmaking department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2016, and received a Master's degree in Experimental Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts China in 2019.

Rooted in her daily body perception,Liao Wen's artistic practice expands across sculpture, performance and video, and explores variations of emotion within the body through vivid sculptural language. Her experience of making ventriloquist puppets in her early career inspired a fresh perspective on sculpture. By reproducing body parts and organs, Liao Wen awakens body perception through reconstruction of pain. Her recent work focuses on the theme of "the body in rituals", externalizing the state of mind and body suspended at a critical point of conflict in a temporarily stable structure.

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