‘My working process is like that of a street cleaner,’ says the Shanghai-based artist whose work was one of many highlights of the Online Viewing Rooms

Yu Ji’s uncanny sculptural world

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Early March, as the world ground to a halt, I met with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/23052/Yu-Ji" target="_blank">Yu Ji&nbsp;</a>for a studio visit. We convened outside AM Art Space, an independent project the young Shanghai-based artist has been running since 2008 with her partner Deng Yeming, where she used to have a workspace. She then drove me south, all the way to her new home and studio, near the seaside in Fengxian District. Over the hour-long car ride, we talked about the state of the world and watched Shanghai slowly peel off its many layers, Art Deco buildings giving way to rough concrete towers, manicured greenery morphing into farmland. When we got out of the car, I could smell the slight saltiness of the sea breeze.

Over the past six years Yu has established herself as one of China’s foremost artists working primarily with sculptures and installations – although that hasn’t kept her from venturing into video and performance. Underlying her oftentimes site-specific projects are unique, perceptive observations of everyday environments, where the natural and the built, the living and the inert, are fuzzily entangled. The objects and materials recurring in her work are usually mundane and ubiquitous. To Yu, they are fascinating not because of their physical properties, but as she puts it, their ‘evocative sense of animacy.’ And once she picks them up, they tend to linger in her works in a plethora of forms and states. For one of her earliest sculptures, Nothing about human being (2007), for instance, she collected used bars of soap (‘I never use shower gel, only soap,’ she says) and cast them in plaster – skin flakes, hairs, and all – a process that resulted in a sensuous tracery of somatic intimacy. Fatty acid in solid form, soap has persisted in her more recent works: It is sometimes melted and mixed into concrete for casting, as seen at her solo exhibition presented in Taipei in 2016, ‘Diary of Sulfur Mining – Pataauw’. On other occasions, it is directly employed in its solid state to assume human flesh, as with her figurative sculpture Oliv! Oliv! (2017).

‘My working process is like that of a street cleaner,’ says Yu. Indeed, her projects over the past few years have often involved spending extended amounts of time in various locations, foraging for objects – plants, metal chains, construction waste – and reworking them into psycho-geographic accounts of the experience. ‘It’s an embodied, laborious field study,’ she says, describing her methodology. In 2017, during a month-long residency in Athens for the group exhibition ‘Prec(ar)ious Collectives’, a collaboration between the Pavillon Neuflize OBC (the research lab of the Palais de Tokyo) and Fluxum Foundation/Flux Laboratory, Yu was particularly inspired by the city’s energy, which she experienced when visiting its farmers’ markets. Her residency culminated in four interrelated works involving scavenged objects – lampshades, iron chains, used mirrors, rocks, and agaves – and olive-oil soap, a regional specialty sold in local markets. The latter component appeared not only in Oliv! Oliv!, it was also used throughout the exhibition space as a crayon, smeared on mirrors and dead agave leaves as though the result of a child’s prank. ‘Exhibition spaces feel cold and dead,’ says Yu, ‘I am constantly trying to inject them with a sense of life.’

Yu frequently uses the word ‘ambiguity’ when she describes her work. ‘I always find myself pursuing forms that are not clear-cut, that are even obscure, to the point of being ineffable,’ she observes. This enigmatic quality is most evident in two ongoing sculpture series – Flesh in Stone and Ta Jama – iterations of which are regularly incorporated within her presentations. The former consists of figurative concrete sculptures representing human forms, often without feet, arms, or heads, a notable exception being Flesh in Stone-Components #3, first shown at the 2017 Hugo Boss Asia Award, and then at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The fragmented nature of these bodily sculptures, precariously supported by adjustable iron armatures, even sometimes deliberately broken or entangled with a rebar, captures the inescapable friction between the human body and the physical environment. In Ta Jama the artist repeatedly shapes enormous concrete blocks into stones. Occasionally, she even grows moss on their surfaces, tacks her own hair (dyed seaweed green) onto them, or daubs them with resin. Her idiosyncratic material play grants mundane materials a whimsical vitality of their own.

On our way back downtown, watching the city replay itself outside the window, it occurred to me that perhaps the ambiguity Yu seeks has to do with the times and places where the natural and the man-made commingle to form an inseparable whole. With the curiosity of a child and the meticulousness of a mature sculptor, she inserts her own body into the flows of energies and matter that compose various locales and distills them into something unique and wondrous.Yu Ji is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1262/Sadie-Coles-HQ" target="_blank">Sadie Coles HQ</a>, London, which is presenting a new piece from her&nbsp;'Flesh in Stone' series as part of the gallery's presentation for the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/ovr?utm_source=homepage&amp;utm_medium=module&amp;utm_campaign=ovrj20&amp;utm_content=promomodule" target="_blank">Online Viewing Rooms</a>. The artist is also represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1401/Edouard-Malingue-Gallery" target="_blank">Edouard Malingue</a> Gallery, Hong Kong, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1542/Galerie-Martin-Janda" target="_blank">Galerie Martin Janda</a>, Vienna.Alvin Li is an author and curator based in Shanghai.&nbsp;Top image: Yu Ji by&nbsp;Ren Anyi for Art Basel.

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‘My working process is like that of a street cleaner,’ says the Shanghai-based artist whose work was one of many highlights of the Online Viewing Rooms