Veering: Hu Xiaoyuan’s Invitation to an Open-World Adventure
In her most recent solo exhibition, Veering, which is on view at JC Contemporary in Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, through April 16, 2025, Hu Xiaoyuan continues contemplating the notion of paths. Similar to the installation layout of her previous exhibition, Paths in the Sand at the West Bund Museum in Shanghai two years ago, Veering invites the viewers to roam around the maze-like space and view the works in their chosen sequence. Hu divides the gallery into smaller compartments with translucent silk curtains suspended from the ceiling, encouraging the viewers to take a beeline to the works that interest them the most, skip some if they like, discover works hidden in the corner, and view the same piece from different angles. By doing so, she releases the control of imposing a single logic that dictates how the works should be seen and understood. However, rather than leaving the exhibition's interpretation to everything goes, this layout echoes her continuing inquiry into our existing convictions associated with paths. If, in Paths in the Sand, the artist considers following a trail in the haphazard world futile, as the series titled “A Winding Path to Nowhere” featured in the exhibition suggests, then in Veering, she questions the very essence of paths as something facilitating and desirable.
Paths are inherently a liminal space, as they connect here and there, now and then, and internal and external, among many different realms. While not always readily available, their presence often indicates reassurance, certainty, and a promise to take us from where we are to where we want to be. However, they also delineate the world in the shape of their internal logic, setting boundaries of what they deem possible and conducive while eliminating everything else from our imagination. For example, linear history is a path that takes us from the past to the present, which implies a causal effect framework that seems capable of projecting a possible future. Nonetheless, putting one pathway between different events under a spotlight also leaves numerous facts, variables, and possibilities out in the dark as if they do not exist. One can only explore them and be liberated from the structural limitations by veering from a perceived orthodox path. Hu’s exhibition offers viewers a chance to reconsider the abundant options we have but never recognized.
Carpel I, 2024.
Calabash, Xiao (raw silk), iron wire, discarded fish spear, iron rod, thread.
25 × 26 × 307 cm.
Veering is an immersive exhibition that resembles an archeological site filled with tools, artifacts, personal items, plant remains, and building materials waiting to be excavated. A freestanding installation entitled Carpel I (2024) greets visitors at the entrance. Resting on the trident of a lanky fish spear, this work evokes the shape of carpels, which it is named after. Carpels are the female reproductive organs that stem from a flower’s center. They receive pollens from one end and transfer them to the basal ovary to bear seeds. On top of the spear’s handle, the artist installs half of a calabash and then creates a delicate, translucent globe structure wrapped around it, resembling an ovary. From it, a pale-pink pistil extends high into the air, shaky but unabashed. The fish spear is transformed from a deadly weapon and has become a foundation to produce and sustain life. While deviating from the right way it should be used, Hu’s re-imagination lends a new path for this obsolete tool to function in the age of total mechanization.
For the upper half of this piece, the artist forges its core structure with iron wires and then covers it with light Xiao, or raw silk, a material she has frequently used in recent years. Hu mentions in an interview with this exhibition’s curators that Xiao is made by boiling the cocoons in hot water to kill and prevent the silkworms from disrupting the fabric’s textures when they metamorphose into moths. For her, while Xiao is soft and exquisite, they embody violence and cruelty. Perhaps because of this exacting making process, raw silk has been expensive and exclusive to the aristocrats and elites. One of the earliest records of this material appears in the Confucian classic Book of Rites (475-221 BCE), which states that if literati-officials wear fox-fur robes, they must cover them with dark-colored Xiao. Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi also mentions this raw silk in his famous poem Ballad of the Lute (816 CE), commemorating a chance encounter with an anguished, aging courtesan as he went to meet with a friend drifting on the river in a boat. In the darkening autumn evening, she narrated her life through a melancholic song, in which she recalled receiving unaccountable bolts of Xiao for her performances in her heyday, and toffs competed to pay for them. While many other famous poets mention Xiao in their work, it often alludes to an opulent life. In contrast, Hu wraps it around dilapidated beams, discarded wood, and drying fruits to emphasize the ephemeral nature of the material world. In Carpel I (2024), the raw silk-covered iron wire sprouts from the spear's handle like an organic being budding, evoking a delicate balance between nature and humanity. However, while the carpel's gauzy tissues heal and renew this man-made tool, it also implies that nature is reclaiming its rightful territory, absorbing artifacts back into its system.
Back:
Corona on the Wasteland, or Wasteland on the Corona I, 2024.
Aerospace aluminium, mirror, Xiao (raw silk), ink, mulberry bark fibre, corn fibre, eggshell, Venus clam, wool, plastic, discarded lightweight rebar, iron wire, steel wire, fibreglass, thread.
510 × 260 × 270 cm.
Front:
Divination Records, 2024.
White marble, basalt, discarded wooden beam, ink, Xiao (raw silk), lacquer, iron nails, iron wire.
600 × 900 × 350 cm.
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The center of the exhibition space is dedicated to two large installations in conversation with each other. Installed at the corner is Corona on the Wasteland, or Wasteland on the Corona I (2024), a complex piece made of aerospace aluminum panels intersecting at right angles. A sloping shelf in the middle of its corner holds a peculiar yet delicate life-form, shaped like a long-legged spider, a flower, or a jellyfish on the edge, and its tentacles dangling in midair. Similar to the upper part of Carpel I (2024), this squiggly creature is also skinned with translucent gossamer. Behind the work’s opening front, the artist creates a low ramp using iron wires to support the structure and broken mirrors as its surface. On top of the mirrors, she places small organic forms in various shapes made with corn fiber and wrapped in black-colored Xiao. Hu stages this installation to evoke an abandoned residence or an animal’s lair. For her, the rectangular ramp evokes simultaneously a bed and a coffin. It is unclear whether the objects covered in black raw silk allude to the remains of a person who once lived and was buried here. However, as the viewers approach them to take a closer look, they see their own reflection overlapped with these items.
Corona on the Wasteland, or Wasteland on the Corona I (Detail), 2024.
Inspired by Paul Celan’s poem Corona (1948), this piece examines the notion of time in a cyclical framework and its relation to memory and human existence. Originally written in his mother tongue, German, it was composed during Celan’s sojourn in Vienna when he escaped from a labor camp after World War II. Addressing to his lover at the time, the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who was not of Jewish descendant as Celan and whose father was a Nazi, the poem begins with a conversation with autumn, a season alludes to his grief and anguish of losing both of his parents, who perished in concentration camps. In the opening stanza, Celan expresses his desire to move on from the painful memory of the horrifying past, but he finds that time refuses to proceed and returns to its shell. In the following stanzas, he wanders with his lover across different temporalities and realms, whether in reality or a dreamlike trance, trying to find solace and safety, away from a memory that is too atrocious to bear. Toward the poem's end, Celan and his lover stand high and look down from their apartment window at the crowds gathered on the street. This is their crowning moment, as suggested by the title “Corona,” which refers to Corona Borealis, a crown of the gods in mythology, or a wreath in Greek. Speaking his truth to the crowd, Celan declares it is time for the stone to bloom, alluding to his work of shoveling rocks while he was in a labor camp and the fact that he can never properly bury his parents with gravestones. In other words, it’s time to move on from the period that haunts him. By doing so, there is hope to recover what has been lost. He pleads, “It is time for it to be time.” Here, Celan returns to the poem's beginning, asking time to come out from its shell and continue the circle of life and death, liberating him from the perpetual frozen state of agony. Scholars, including John Felstiner and Jerry Glenn, observe that the last line, “It is time,” imitates Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Day in Autumn (1902), which famously begins with,
After the summer's yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.
In his poem, Rilke considers the passage of time a relentless force, sealing an individual’s momentary choices or the lack thereof in perpetuity and promptly bringing on their results as it progresses into the next season. By evoking this poem, Celan asks that time to do the same for him, to carry him across the “sea in the moon’s blood-beam,” and to become something else, something or anything indeed other than what he was, and hence, the “unrest’s heart started to beat.”
Corona on the Wasteland, or Wasteland on the Corona II, 2024.
Steel, aerospace aluminium, discarded lightweight rebar, stainless steel mesh, iron wire, mirror, Xiao (raw silk), hornet nest, dried orange peel, Venus’s flower basket, shaman stone.
160 × 95 × 293 cm.
By alluding to Celan’s poem, Hu zooms in on the notion of time in this work, a common central theme. As its title, Corona on the Wasteland, or Wasteland on the Corona I, II (2024) suggests, she posits this installation at the intersection of Celan’s Corana (1948) and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), both of which interweave fragments of past, present, and future into a world where they overlap, interact, and counteract with each other. However, they understand the notion of time through very different frameworks. While Celan considers the notion of time from a personal perspective, emphasizing the ruptures and chaos among different temporal registers, Eliot’s cyclical time, explored in this poem, concerns the repetitive nature of history, especially how the past is always part of the present. If Hu deliberately uses the mirror-surfaced ramp to symbolize the cycle of life and death, then the aluminum panels and the mystic organic forms they hold on the shelf are a perfect juxtaposition between modern industrialization and nature. Contrary to the narratives promoted by the notion of linear time, where human beings have been evolving along with our constant progression of technological innovations in an inevitable and irrevocably one-way direction, this piece suggests that much leeway exists for us to explore our options. In other words, we do not have to stay on one specific course dictated by the linear framework. For individuals, this suggests that what lies between one’s birth and death is an open world adventure rather than a tunnel-visioned race track. For the collective, it asks us to reconsider the future we want to build, not necessarily where the linear framework of time projects will arrive unerringly. As Bruno Latour argues in his We Have Never Been Modern (1991), the modern notion of linear time is an illusion that falsely separates culture and nature, which are entangled through human and non-human factors in a network where the past, present, and future co-exist. Therefore, for Latour, our current issues, such as climate change, are also not on a single, linear timeline, but are the nexus where many temporalities interweave. The juxtaposition of objects representing nature and culture from different periods is particularly evident in Hu Xiaoyuan’s Corona on the Wasteland, or Wasteland on the Corona II (2024). The teetering architectural structure of aerospace aluminium, steel wires, raw silk, a piece of dried fruit, and a deep-sea glass sponge visualizes this multidimensional notion of time. They allow and encourage the viewers to veer into territories uncharted by the linear framework and rethink what it means by progress.
The centerpiece, Divine Record, refers to a poem of the same title allegedly composed by the famous poet and aristocrat Qu Yuan in 821. Written approximately three years after he was slandered, exiled, and banned from his beloved King of Chu, the poem describes his visit to the Grand Diviner Zhan Yin of Zheng, where he “inquired the deities on how to conduct oneself.” In despair and confusion, he cried, “Should I keep behaving in the way that I know is right and moral, or force myself to consort with the vile and petty people who commit despicable misconduct to seize power and wealth?” Upon hearing Qu’s questions, Zhan Yin dropped the devices he prepared to perform the divination, regretting that this matter was too complicated and solemn to answer, and encouraging him to proceed with whatever he saw fit. While the title ostensibly asks where a suitable dwelling place is, the poem alludes to which is the right pathway to take. Although contemporary scholars consider that this piece was written by people who mourned and commemorated Qu after he committed suicide, generations of literati and officials cited it to express dissent, fury, and distress in dark times throughout history.
Divination Records (Details), 2024.
White marble, basalt, discarded wooden beam, ink, Xiao (raw silk), lacquer, iron nails, iron wire.
600 × 900 × 350 cm.
Divination Records (Details), 2024.
White marble, basalt, discarded wooden beam, ink, Xiao (raw silk), lacquer, iron nails, iron wire.
600 × 900 × 350 cm.
Here in Hu Xiaoyuan’s work, she visually evokes the poem by erecting a dilapidated wooden beam in the center of the main gallery and placing the expensive white marble blocks on the floor, pressed yet under another beam that the artist found in deserted temples in rural villages. Even though Hu wrapped the hollows in the wooden beams with precious Xiao silk as if to heal their wounds or cover their deficiency, they are nowhere near the quality and value of the marbles that are left scattered on the periphery. Metaphorically, this work poses the same questions as those Qu laments in various verses:
“Is it better,’ Qu Yuan asked him, ‘to be painstakingly honest, simple-hearted and loyal, or to keep out of trouble by welcoming each change as it comes?
Is it better to risk one’s life by speaking truthfully and without concealment, or to save one’s skin by following the whims of the wealthy and highly placed?
Is it better to preserve one’s integrity by means of a lofty detachment, or to wait on a king’s mistress with flattery, fawning, and strained, smirking laughter?
‘Is it better to be honest and incorruptible and to keep oneself pure, or to be accommodating and slippery, to be compliant as lard or leather?
‘Is it better to have the aspiring spirit of a thousand li stallion, or to drift this way and that like a duck on water, saving oneself by rising and falling with the waves?
Is it better to run neck and neck with the swiftest, or to follow in the footsteps of a broken hack?
Is it better to match wing-tips with the flying swan, or to dispute for scraps with chicken and ducks?
Of these alternatives, which is auspicious and which is ill-omened? which is to be avoided and which to be followed?”
(Qu, Yuan. Translated by David Hawkes. The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems. London: Penguin, 2011.)
In other words, whether to stick to the map or take the road less travelled? Veering from the main path that seems right and only, and heading into the unknown is scary and often unthinkable. Yet in this work, Hu quietly suggests that the monumental pillar occupying the central and authoritative position can be corrupted at heart under the exquisite fabric wrapped on the surface, while the noble and worthy lie in the obscure. Of course, there is never any guarantee that one will find them, but without venturing into the open world, the chance is zero.
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The author confirms there is no potential conflict of interest.
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