Egg-Born, Moisture-Born, With Scales, Without Scale2024
Stainless steel
Commissioned by 2024 Jing’an International Sculpture Project (JISP) and UCCA Lab, Shanghai
Originated from the Egg-Born, Moisture-Born, With Scales, Without Scale series (2021-ongoing), the sculpture is a continuation of the artist's speculative ecology, merging different systems of knowledge spanning geology, natural history, life sciences and traditional Chinese medicine. The title references the categorization system in the Bencao Gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica). Originally published in 1598, this ancient Chinese compendium presents the first taxonomy of vegetal, human, animal, mineral, and man-made matter, including some hybrid species that seem to come straight out of Borges’ fictional Chinese encyclopedia. "Egg-Born" and "Moisture-Born" indicate the criteria of genesis. "Scaly", as one of the chapter titles, refers to the biological anatomy that distinguishes organisms, while in English, the term "scale" also means an ordered reference standard.
The inspiration for the sculpture comes from electron microscopic images that the artist has encountered in her previous research projects, including blue-green algae, fungi and soil bacteria, symbolising the intangible structures that signify the origin of life. The making synthesises multiple processes and techniques: It is initially hand sculpted by the artist with borosilicate glass and then scanned in three dimensions and digitally manipulated. With an abstract form that evokes preconscious memories of primordial organisms, while dissolving the boundaries between natural and synthetic, the sculpture exudes a mixed sense of familiarity and estrangement, perhaps recognized from past incarnations of our very biological and mineral origin; while simultaneously encoding the clues of future evolution.