Liu Fujie Solo Exhibition: Bone Shards, Snap Course

Text by: Meng Xianhui

"Sculpture," in Chinese, is, in fact, a composite word that brings together the two opposing attributes of this medium – subtracting and adding. Meanwhile, the work of a sculptor often invests time into the material under the premise of feasibility so that the ideas in one’s mind can materialize in the final work. Artistic practice provides an exit to one's imagination while the working process lapses toward addition and subtraction.

"Every object, every form, every matter can be a passage to experience the hollows of world." In her sculptural practice in recent years, Liu Fujie has had a distinct sense of where her practice is headed from using a multitude of materials. Naturally, she tries to condense the scope of language available to focus on subjects of her concerns. Extending her exploration of place, passage, and ways in which the body meets a place in her 2021 solo exhibition“Three Exit Strategies," Liu Fujie's new solo exhibition at CLC Gallery Venture,“Bone Shards, Snap Course," invites viewers to discover their pathways through the scattered works of art, getting a sense of materials’structure and dynamics, and the paths of the artist's imagination through the movement of their eyes and bodies.

"In different ways, hollows, voids or space, as well as objecthood or mass, have infiltrated modern sculpture." Antony Gormley, inShaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now, discussed the boundaries between internal space and external form with Martin Gayford, who provided several examples to address why the concept of the void has accrued so much attention in the world of sculpture. Sculpture is an art of spatial relations and forms; its medium and approaches become the means by which the artist projects her thought process. In Liu Fujie's view, a bridge, a corridor, a container, a direction, clues, one’s gaze, and a flash of the idea is the path that drives the process, and such seemingly abstract concepts emerge from the artist's actual lived and perceptual experiences.

Over the past two years, Liu Fujie drove back and forth between her studio, art exhibitions, and other destinations; being inside the narrow space of her car and looking out at the countless unfinished viaducts in the distance triggered the artist's imagination. These essential structures in any urban setting aim to connect one place to another, accelerating communication speed between people. When a single dimension is unable to carry existing demands, with sufficient technological support, more three-dimensional spaces are created to connect multiple locations; before such structures are completed, their existence blockades from reaching others, where the pending process of construction using concrete and steel are widely exposed in many areas of the city. Liu Fujie translates her perceptual experiences of such spatial sense into works such asPassage, Bridge,where familiar forms awaken our experiences in urban spaces. At the same time, their miniature dimensions allow us different perspectives to re-examine and imagine how we have crawled or climbed in these spaces.

Adopting phenomena from real-life experience is not only reflected in the macroscopic perspective of overlooking the city but also in Liu Fujie's projection of subtle insights into her works such asKeeping Aqua Plantsand the "Still Life Platform" series, in which a sense of care emerges from the superimposition of a slide’s rolling form and the tray underneath, suggesting "mountains," while the hanging part of the soft fabric, like channels shaped by infiltrated liquid, and the fluid moments preserved on smooth stainless steel surfaces, point the imagery engendered from these works to imaginations of water and the ocean. "I imagine the sea where I can't see it," Liu Fujie once described her fascination with the world under the sea, like the silent and still shell (vortex) inStill-life Platform, where the ebb and flow of the imagined tides hold the imaginations of the artist and the viewer.

"Everything has a structure," J.E. Gordon wrote inWhat is Structure?"Biological structures have been around long before artificial ones. Before the advent of life, there was no purposeful structure in the world, only hills, dunes, and gravel. As simple as they might have been, primordial life forms had a delicate balance." The process of evolution is pushed forward by the emergence of more robust biological materials and more subtle living structures. Those soft, hard, light, and rigid attributes embody multiple dimensions of evolution and inspire Liu Fujie to correlate imagination from ancient times and the future. In this exhibition, one will discover "containers" from cast molds, such asFruits seen through Light in the Shadehanging in the air like a bell, which connects the life that was once nurtured and now, like a whalebone, a skeletal remains that crosses the land, sea, and space-time.

Since 2022, Liu Fujie has begun to pay attention to everyday and spiritual objects and formal relationships between plants and marine life in the natural world. She attributes this shift to her being confined to a monotonous environment for an extended time, which led her to search for sculptural language that speaks to mysterious and primitive forms. The imagery of pipes, cohesion, and impact inGlide, along with the hand-drawn, imagined process of continuous change of the hybrid creatures inGlide 1-20, reveals an ever-growing, trans-dimensional structure, an ideal language liberated from traditional forms and conventions. This is similar to exquisite museum illustrations by Ernst Haeckel, whose completely symmetrical forms calculated with mathematical laws may not exist in reality but have influenced the development of Art Nouveau.

Art does not need to replicate reality; blending various imageries would ultimately reach our living space. At the end of the exhibition space,Contemporary Residence after Natural Sciencetransforms the pedestal - a standard form for cultural display – into a possible world with multiple spatial structures, twists, and turned surfaces, showing the Light and texture of everyday objects, overlapping structures, and passages. It provides a discrete space beyond the surface, allowing viewers to store their innermost feelings and thoughts.

Liu Fujie often draws countless arrows without noticing; as they accumulate to a certain number, the final direction forms their pattern. In the artist's view, connecting is often neglected in a structure or a process, as if the final destination is paramount. Instead, she feels that the act and forms of connecting require more attention. The central piece of this exhibition,Spinning Grove, exhibits a playful spiral structure that adopts hybrid creatures and structural pathways to graft the parts together, allowing the curves between spaces and life forms to be passed along the train of thought. Liu Fujie believes that those moments of going through passages and hollow spaces constitute her experience of the world. With the varying viewing positions ofLookandGaze, the works scatter like fragments in random occurrence. A viewer would follow their respective viewing position as if standing within a cranial space, where unexpected and fragmented assemblage through individual pathways would envision the diverse marvels of this world.