RESEARCHAll overgrown by cunning moss

It is hard not to notice the growing vitality of plants within Zhang Ruyi’s exhibitions over the past five years. In her various works, cactus of all types try to infiltrate through crevices like peephole, drain covers, pipes and niches. Their energy resonate with the “susuwatari” (wandering soots) that inhabit human homes in Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Emily Dickinson’s “cunning moss”, as well as the roaring junipers[1]  in Cyprien Gaillard’s Nightlife (2015). In Zhang Ruyi’s recent exhibition “Modern Fossil” (2022), upon entering the door, an air-dried cactus is displayed on a niche, shaped like sea urchins and held by a cake cup that moulded out of cement (Dessert, 2021).  And there is a sculptural chimera at calf height called Modern Fossil (Pipe)-1 (2021). The texture of concrete unifies the three elements: the snake-like water pipe has a Euphorbia venenifica on one side and a Echinopsis tubiflora on the other, entwined together. Carrying the function of loading water, this peculiar sculpture suggests that 80% of the water in the succulent can be exchanged through a sewage pipe linking the two ends of the cactus.

One body has two sides, so does Zhang Ruyi’s work itself. One of the aspects which has been repeatedly mentioned is architectural, yet on the other hand, the aspect of interspecies entanglement is relatively rarely explored in depth. Let’s start with the first aspect. Since her first solo exhibition, “Things I Don’t Understand” (2011), she has made the attempt to use exhibition as a medium, and experimented her artistic practice by transforming the displaying space. Sleepwalking about the Space (2021) in this exhibition is one of the examples, in which she uses concrete to fills the hollow of a second-hand wooden door, including the round hole of the lock cylinder, and seals the board with mosaic tiles.

Zhang really enjoys the process of “playing with space”. [2] A friend who has visited her solo exhibition named “Cut | Off” (2014) described to me that the interior transformation reminded him of the experience of looking for a beam in the aisle in his apartment to install a fitness equipment – it has to fit the wall perfectly and flip over the whole space at the same time. When it comes to the architectural aspect, people often focus on how she evokes the subtle emotions of the living space. Some critics have called this nostalgia for a particular everyday space and time. But on closer examination, the origins of nostalgia is ambiguous: was it the eviction campaign in the city of Beijing[3] and Shanghai[4] in the 1990s, or the cityscape renovations triggered by the Shanghai World Expo and the Beijing Olympics in the 2000s, or perhaps the 2017 “beautification project”; in Beijing, and the illegal blockade of private accommodation in Shanghai? For me, these Schrödinger’s spacetimes are no more than superficial associations on the level of reproduction, inadvertently reflecting the treacherous sense of time in Chinese cities. To get to the heart of the work, it should be more than the traces of decoration itself.

My first personal memory of Zhang Ruyi’s work was from “Building Opposite Building” (2016) at Blackstone Apartments, particularly the cabinet of curiosity made from an aquarium. The aquarium comes with its own LED lights, responding to the blocked glass windows and artificial light in the exhibition hall like a matryoshka doll. The artist added water into it, raised fish and immersed the concrete-casted sculpture in the form of a building in this artificial environment. From an ecological point of view, the “environment” is within us, nothing is external to us. The aquarium is both a pedestal for the sculpture and an implication of the environment in which the sculpture lives. In fact, we only have to briefly trace the history of the glass aquarium to illustrate its nature as an environmental building. The prototype of the aquarium was derived from the Wardian case. In the 1830s, Londoners, who were suffered from air pollution, experimented with glass enclosures to provide confined space for plants in their backyard gardens, in order to separate them from smog and accidentally kept the plants alive. The artist continued to use the same material to create a series of works based on the artificial environment, including Submerged Landscape (2019) and Dim Light Box (2020), etc., which reveal the importance of the topic of “architecture produces nature”. While the historical trail of biological breeding equipment, which represents the achievements of domesticated plants and animals, reflects the artist’s understanding of this.

Let’s enter the other side of Janus. Zhang Ruyi’s early works included a series of paintings of cactus. In those days, the thorny cactus was more of a symbolic presence. The artist sees it as a projection of herself, in an autobiographical and hermeneutic sense. In the recent years, her works has begun to focus more on other aspects of plants than aesthetics, and on the interaction between plants and other industrial materials.

In Zhang Ruyi’s solo exhibition “Modern Fossil” (2022), two collage works Desolation of Memories 1 & 2(2021-2022) are placed flat on the floor, exploring the vertical dimension of depth from the horizontal downwards. In these two works, the cactus images printed onto the tinfoil are somewhat like rock painting attached with silver foil. Other materials including different kinds of copper wire mesh, net bag like the one that you use for holding gingers, and sandpaper – are pressed in layers under sheets of a glass panel, forming irregular grids of varied forms. In the artist’s description, these two works are more or less similar to a childhood writing desk, where even crumpled sugar paper patterns were pressed under the glass panel in order to preserve cherished images. When unfolded, extremely complicated texture of fractal topology were inadvertently created.

In the case of Desolation of Memories (2021), the focus of presenting the girlish moment of the glass-pressed document is not on the emotional texture itself. Rather, it is a retrospective realisation: this is the earliest archival production technique one can use, and different geological layers emerge depending on the degree of patience of this archivist. And it is in these documentary geological layers that different things overlap with each other, suggesting the intertwined forms of life.

When I arrived at Zhang’s studio, which is located in a reformed factory building, I saw a variety of succulent life flourishing in the room, with moulds of columnar cacti scattered aside. Compared to the various forms in which the greenery lives and dies in her studio, the “Modern Fossil” gives a very different impression. Cactus spines are sewn onto a translucent film, like some kind of dry embossing techniques. And Daily Accessories (2021) in the centre of the exhibition space seems like the ground of a dry swimming pool, while the only real plant in the space is nearly dead. Such a contrast reminds me of director Tsai Ming-liang, who likes to stir up life with water. When encountering massive water restrictions in Taipei, his filming strategy suddenly changed: when Chen Shiang-chyi dines in the restaurant, the restaurant does not offer the daily soup and coffee; Lee Kang-Sheng goes to the toilet with no water to flush, while the camera looks up to capture the blazing sun. Looking back at the “Modern Fossil”, the concrete-moulded succulents and sewage pipes are the only juicy object in the exhibition. Just like Tsai Ming-liang’s cinematography, the water cycle is documented in its absence.

In the course of more than a decade of artistic practice, significant changes have taken place in her works’s characteristics during this long and imperceptible period, just like the plant. The cactus in the studio is no longer a simple object depicted by the artist, but a companion species that occurs in the artist’s life. The plants are placed in the exhibition “Modern Fossil”; as well as the artist’s studio, one withers and the other thrives. I feel that it is the artistic vocabulary lurking beneath the surface of the water that is far more complex and interesting than the architectural / botanical duality. To paraphrase a statement from The Art of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), Zhang deals with “form, texture, colour, a process of constant speculation as pattern” ; “Centuries of grafting, cultivation, trade, taxation, and disease are inscribed onto their structure and shape”.[5] These succulents, petrified by Zhang Ruyi, are still growing in their forms and appear to be taking the artist further afield.

Reference:

[1]Cyprien Gaillard, Nightlife, 3D color video, 14’56”, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY5ty2GimEI&t=30s

[2] Aimee Lin, “The concrete uncanny in the sculptures and installations of a young Chinese artist tap into contemporary sensations of isolation, alienation and urban dysfunction” in ArtReview AsiaSpring 2017. p.65. https://issuu.com/artreview_magazine/docs/artreview_asia_spring_2017

[3] Colin Siyuan Chinnery, “Dispatches: Beijing” in Frieze, 6 November 2017. https://www.frieze.com/article/dispatches-beijing

[4] Leo Sands, “Shanghai: Green fences baffle locked down residents” in BBC News, 25 April 2022.https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-61209761

[5] Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson & Nils Bubandt, “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. p.G5.