Li jia

Through the open window of a residence on Tongren Road in Shanghai, dwellers downstairs are seen in groups of three or five, chitchatting with their elbows held, and balconies of the opposite building either sprout bars hanging drying clothes or are obscured by potted plants. When the day is clear, breezes blowing through the window carry a vague noise of the city, occasionally mingled with children’s cheers. All suggest a familiar homelike moment, but once you turn around and look indoors, the scenario apprises you instantly that what unfolds before your eyes is not quotidian: a roughcast flat of bare cement, bricks and building structure installed sporadically with unexplained bright-coloured objects which have replaced the customary household items. “This is like a ghost’s room,” you may blurt, and that is probably the first impression evoked by Nabuqi’s latest project. Some of her recent works, having been exhibited openly, are presented in an unfurnished roughcast flat; the works, together with the way they meet audience, insinuate a thought-provoking connection with dwelling and domestic space.

Nabuqi titles her show Ghost, Skin, Dwelling. It is not her first time to display works of art in a residential space. In 2017, her art residency in Paris was concluded with a presentation in an apartment (which was also her temporary studio then); she gleaned movements and sounds of passers-by in the street, amalgamated them into photographs and videos, and juxtaposed the processed materials in a room with objects like vagrant’s paper cup, thereby bringing the outdoor living and activities in a realistic tableau into a room. Not only is the room a home that contains and safeguards a personal world, it also serves as an exclave where the artist can unbridle imagination and experiment with creativity—in this project, moreover, the room itself has transformed into an installation that invites audience to step in, and the intrinsic domiciliary traces, such as fireplace, sconce and radiator, all hint at a sort of invasion incarnated by the indoor imageries and substances. Here comes the grapple of the dichotomous spaces. Nabuqi once attributed the inspiration of this project one of her favourite novels—House Taken Overby Julio Cortázar. One day, the old house in which the protagonists had long lived started to be gradually taken over by an unseen power, which ended up expelling them from the place. The ghost-like nature of this unknown matter impressed the artist deeply—it can be perceived for real by human senses (by making sound and creating vibration), though not visible, intelligible or catchable; it coexists with human beings but is not controlled by them, and its behaviours and intentions are incalculable. In other words, ghost speaks for the unsettled grey area between perception and substantiality, the latent core that refuses to be swallowed by the logics of real life or the superficial functions of everyday spaces.

Under the skin of the common world, uneasy ghosts are lurking. Perhaps such imagery has haunted Nabuqi since the project in Paris? Four years later inside this dwelling on Tongren Road, it is carried out more explicitly and expounded to a greater degree—though by different means. Instead of breaking into existing rooms with ready-mades and images, Nabuqi configures the space with freestanding sculptures and installations to imply the duality of the exhibition venue (i.e. residence/display room). Taking a review at her oeuvre in the last five years, it is noticeable that her creations progressed along two parallel paths. One is the traditional method of sculpturing that renders evenly textured materials such as bronze, aluminium and stainless steel into freestanding sculptures; series including The Doubtful Siteand A View beyond Space are examples. The other is to deploy a combination of ready-mades and daily articles within the space to build a new locale, like in Do Real Things Happen in Moments of Rationality? and How to Be “Good Life”. Simply put, the former method realises self-contained sculptural works which can move about in the space, while the latter sets up holistic spatial locales where hardly can anything be attributed as art in the conventional sense or account for a meaning independently. InGhost, Skin, Dwelling, there is a sign that the twodiffering paths are crossing: individual sculptures and installations are combined in an original residence, by which, furthermore, a relation is established between the works and the space. For instance, a group of bronze sculptures (the Fossilseries), each with a slender rod extending from an either round or cylindrical stand, reaching upright or tilting up into the air and culminating with a bulbous component on the end, is reminiscent of various forms of floor lamp. Another group (the Drifting Seatseries) consists of seats assuming simplistic geometry (rectangle, circle and cylinder); a further group (the Petseries), coloured with highly saturated red and blue, adopts rockery shapes detailed with a miniature garden on the top. These are all associable with typical household amenities or decorations.

However, these sculptures—let’s we call them so—have unclear nature and boundary, for they lack what could define them as furniture, decorations or sculptures at first glance. Maybe it is because they are purposely placed within the same residential space (though not typical) that the assemblage of lights, seats and bonsai seem reasonable? Maybe it is owing to their extremely ambiguous semblance and paradoxical core? Fossil No.2comprises shapes of light bulb, winding wires and plug, but the bronze material builds them into anything but a real floor lamp. Like the colourful rockeries in the Pet series, they do not deliver any practical function, but does that categorise them as plainly decorative? Obviously not in an exhibition context. Still, the appearance of such decoration in an authentic living room filled with all sorts of other daily articles is not impossible. It depends on how the audience construe the relation between the objects and their surroundings—loose or tight, for view or for use? Similar attempts trace back to her Two-way Entrysolo in 2018 where she questioned the objective autonomy of sculptures as well as the monosemy and absolute of spaces by letting the audience into the objects/works. Ghost, Skin, Dwelling takes it even further: it is not only the works that the audience are going to engage in and define but the entire space. Be it intentional or coincidental,Ghost, Skin, Dwellinghas linked works and the environment, exercising a remix and revisualisation on the supposedly abstract and transparent exhibition space to emanate a power that shatters the perception and habitude taken for granted. An alien existence that prevails everyday spaces whose disturbance is invisible but discernible, a ghostlike entity.

“Do real things happen in moments of rationality? How do we comprehend the world we are in, and is seeing believing? When a given or imitated mood occurs, can it be regarded real too although its existence is ill-founded? How should we receive emotions that are aroused?”1Nabuqi once summarised what her then new installations was seeking to explore with these questions. Ghost stands at the midpoint of a maze that either directs viewers toward or diverges them from reality, and its invisible presence calls up the uncertainty and diversity of perception, muddling up the original layering of things. The exhibition greets audience with a cascading artificial fountain in the centre of the space. Bringing public facilities in the city landscape, such as fountain, into a private space to alter the immediate experience and physical response of audience is a method of Nabuqi’s that she used in previous works like Fountain: Night Garden (2020). The form of fountain here, though, is more equivocal. In a lobed pond atop a simplistic cylindrical pedestal, a figurine composed of geometric shapes is pouring water—Nabuqi found a model from a software for architectural design and scaled it up by the pond-garden proportion in reality; therefore, the unprocessed geometric facets are maintained and presented without change. The form can be found in almost any 3D modelling of garden design, being the prototype of realistic construction and fictitious formation alike. Once a fountain is constructed in reality, its preliminary conception, namely, the prototypical image is to be forgotten. Ghostlike imagery dwell in the most ordinary and tangible objects. On the wall behind the fountain, a view of real fountain amid a garden in print further attests to a radical absence or impossibility: a fountain that can never become real, a ghost that never has a shadow.

Nabuqi continues her discourse on the concept of “presence” that predominates in her creation and dialectic: physical reaction to the environment, how experiences and memories are incorporated in the current site, the mismatch of realistic and fictitious tableaux, the swing between perception and substantiality…however, it is the haunting absence that is emphasised here and embedded in the core of “presence”. Nabuqi’s writes in her own account, “installations cast in bronze assume the semblance of floor lamps, geared with bulbs, wires and plugs... but they do not illuminate the room; they only stand there like sculptures. Conversely, luminous floor lamps comprised of disjointed images are like useless furnishings, revealing cheap fragmentary pictures.”2 Bronze lamps have to fall between sculpture and decoration due to the deprival of illumination, whereas luminous lamps light up nothing but the views on their lampshades; when an actual view outside the window seems at our fingertips, those inside are locked in richly coloured pictures obtained from the internet. Back to the question Nabuqi raised, “how do we comprehend the world we are in, and how to distinguish the ‘presence’?”, probably the presence embodied by absence and paradox is to be looked at first and foremost—the presence illuminated by art.

An interesting phenomenon is that until now a philosophy for the art of sculpture is still missing. Some think that, because the art of sculpture is largely based on substance, it is hard to draw a line between sculptures and other artificial or natural objects. For that reason, on the other hand, sculptures provide people with a channel to “thingness” and “togetherness with things”3. “Sculpture… enlivens space, uncovers the specialness and liveliness of it being in that space; its being-in-the-space constitutes its being-in-the-world, and determines our being.”4 Nabuqi’s sculpture first of all concerns presence, body and how substance and space correlate and are perceived.  In that sense, Nabuqi’s practice contains the nature of “meta-sculpture”, being constantly self-referential and self-formative. Her creation of sculpture is also a dialectic upon sculpture. During an interview right before this exhibition, Nabuqi mentioned that she never stopped questioning sculpture closely, and the evolution of her creation reflects the dialectical path and track for sculpture too. She used to understand sculptures as objects that take up space and take on size, like solid blocks and structures; later, she came to find the relation of a sculpture and its space more significant. Now, she is inclined to see sculptures as things. Sculptures assume their meaning through comparison with things. Take the sculptures in Ghost, Skin, Dwellingfor example, they are scattered among functional furniture, functionless decoration and uninterpretable existence, and the deciphering of them is subject to how people view, cognise and utilise things as well as the differences thereof. With the break of absence-presence, truth-falsehood and essence-presentation dichotomies, Nabuqi has emancipated the invisible ghost sealed within things by anthropocentrism.

“People’s external needs, such as house, tent, chair, bed…must impart a liveliness and have an intact perception and ego; therefore, building intimate relations with individuals of mankind endows objects that are inherently external with a personal characteristic resulting from humanity.”5 Hegel’s remark inAesthetikseems to have been reedited by the tightened cords of time from a different aspect. Since when has the appearance of objects become abstruse? Our pursuits for intimacy, sanctuary and belongingness cannot rely on objects anymore. In the current society of late capitalism, facing objects directly is no longer possible; an object deprived of its soul is nothing but a skin, a sign, a smooth mirrored world reigned by the order of symbolisation as well as its emulated logic. To Nabuqi, sculpture harbours the possibility of seeing, knowing, discerning and coexisting with objects. Such ideal is like a dream, but not unlikely. In the residence on Tongren Road, people roam among fountain, bonsai and floor lamps, and bathe in the inpour of breeze, redolent of a homecoming. “Home refuges dreams, protects dreamers, and allows us to dream in serenity.” (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space). Like in Cortázar’s novels, bodies within the home need to regain how to coexist with objects too; in that aged dwelling, after all, they were, are, and will be in coexistence forevermore.