Hu Xiaoyuan: Veering

In the latest exhibition, Veering, at Tai Kwun, the artist Hu Xiaoyuan presents twelve newly commissioned works from seven series, weaving together installation, sound, painting, and video to reveal the complex relationship between human destiny and natural evolution, addressing ultimate questions of individual survival and the meaning of life. Hu incorporates everyday materials like aerospace-grade aluminium, sea shells, organza silk, and corn fibre in her works. Through translucent drapes and lighting design, she creates unique pathways that blur the line between day and night, creating an ambiguous spatial experience. This setting guides visitors to reflect on enduring themes such as time, materiality, existence, and consciousness.

Veering employs a poetic visual style to probe the relationship between the individual and the group, attempting to show how individuals exist and make choices in a broken and dysfunctional contemporary society. Continuing her signature use of long-overlooked objects, Hu Xiaoyuan focuses on the waste from social and biological systems, such as old steel from urban demolition, used implements from daily life, the dry wings of insects and the remains of marine life. For Hu Xiaoyuan, everything, whether organic or inorganic, from large-scale urban architecture to small-scale everyday ephemera, from herself to everything else on the planet, has a life trajectory. She reconfigures, juxtaposes, and combines these seemingly unrelated materials that no longer function, then investigates their meaning via literature, history, and philosophy. Tai Kwun’s revival, from historical monument to cultural hub, parallels the artist’s process of reviving alternative narratives embedded within overlooked things. Resonating with Tai Kwun’s place in the flow of history, her work prompts us to consider how the past continues to shape the present, and how new possibilities can emerge from what has been cast aside.

The exhibition offers a space for contemplation, focusing on the subtlety of the quotidian. In a carefully constructed space-time delineated by gauze curtains and custom-made artificial lights, Hu Xiaoyuan reflects on and tells stories of evolution and destiny, mutation and exile, isolation and freedom, and community and the individual. The gauze curtains, one of the exhibition’s most distinctive features, are made of xiao, a semi-transparent silk fabric that creates various meditative paths through the space. Soft, delicate, and translucent, xiao has a shimmering, supple beauty and derives from raw silk—silk’s most natural, least processed form. Few people, however, are familiar with the process of extracting it. First, silk moth cocoons are exposed to steam, killing the silkworms inside and preventing them from destroying the cocoons’ silk protein fibres as they struggle to emerge. Raw silk is obtained by soaking the cocoons in hot water, softening the gummy substance that holds them together. A long silk fibre is then unreeled from each cocoon, and several fibres are twisted together to form a single strand. Formed in a process that encompasses tenderness and violence, completeness and incompleteness, and life and death, raw silk embodies Hu Xiaoyuan’s many years of thought on materials and metaphor. Xiao has been incorporated throughout the exhibition not just as curtains but as the material used to attach, cover, and wrap her works. The artist’s use of raw silk represents her distinctive take on selecting materials, an approach that integrates her observations of personal destiny with the biological, historical, and literary narratives that inform the materials. By combining this assortment of materials, the artist crafts one-of-a-kind on-site experiences and revelations.

Two of the exhibition’s most striking sculptures, Corona on the Wasteland, or Wasteland on the Corona I, take inspiration from the poem “Corona” by the Jewish German-language poet Paul Celan. In both works, Hu Xiaoyuan places dysfunctional organic matter—including mulberry bark, raw silk unreeled from the cocoon, wool, bones made of corn fibre, dried-out honeycombs, and shrivelled fruits—inside a structure formed from discarded rebar and polished space-grade aluminium. The contrast between the materials creates a powerful visual impact that reflects each object’s individual destiny and the circumstances that brought it to this moment in time and space, echoing the metaphor in Celan’s poem: “Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: / We are friends. / We shell time from the nuts and teach it how to walk: / Time returns to the shell.” Serene yet fragile, the work I Am Rooted, But I Flow. also utilises space-grade aluminium panels and old rebar to construct a space reminiscent of a study. In one corner, a biography written by the artist hangs in a semi-literary, semi-vernacular style. Below, on the desk, an array of shells, corals, dragonfly wings, cicada wings, wool, and other materials are scattered across the surface. Each of these items was either part of an organism or an artefact of life’s evolution, symbolising fragments of life and memory. The displayed materials resonate with the narrative in the text and seek to offer visual and sensory insight into life’s trajectories and transitions.

Other works in the exhibition are extensions of Hu Xiaoyuan’s earlier artistic practice, such as Wood / Time Branch, which continues the artist’s Wood series of paintings begun in 2008. In this series, she covers old wooden boards with Xiao, carefully traces the wood grain onto the silk fabric, and then completely covers the boards with water-borne wood paints. As she repeats this series of actions, the paintings take on the pattern of the wood grain, which is given new life on the raw silk. Life’s limitations also breathe new life into it—the wood grain on the silk fabric imitates the wood grain on the board even as the wood grain on the board limits the painting. In creating these paintings, the artist employs contradiction to demonstrate the relationship between reality and imitation, subjugation and liberation. The paintings are an intellectual enquiry into artistic language and shed light on life and time.

In addition to the works on display in the exhibition hall, Hu Xiaoyuan has created two large-scale outdoor works for Tai Kwun’s 44 and 55 Squared projects, which will be on view at the Tai Kwun Parade Ground throughout the exhibition period. These two monumental images exemplify the artist’s distinctive approach to material selection, focusing on the intricate details of two installations – Corona on the Wasteland, or Wasteland on the Corona I and Carpel II - from Hu Xiaoyuan: Veering at Tai Kwun Contemporary. Running from 24 January to 13 April 2025, the exhibition takes place on the first floor of JC Contemporary.

About the artist
Hu Xiaoyuan (b. 1977) often draws from her own nuanced perception and philosophical reflections on human nature, combining traces of the everyday and natural materials with traditional artistic mediums, blending in an acute sensitivity of material contrasts. Through an interdisciplinary practice that spans installation, video, sculpture, and painting, she creates a distinctive aesthetic that transcends specific experiences, probing the complex meanings of time, space, reality, and migration, along with other concepts embedded within existential themes.

Tai Kwun’s Breakthrough series
As part of Tai Kwun’s Breakthrough series, Veering is presented alongside the solo exhibitions Alicja Kwade: Pretopia and Maeve Brennan: Records, this trio of shows by female artists explores materials and storytelling through diverse, thoughtful approaches. Altogether, these exhibitions reflect Tai Kwun’s commitment to celebrating the current art scene and deepening the public’s understanding of contemporary art.