Hu Xiaoyuan Untitled

NARRATOR:
For artist Hu Xiaoyuan, the finely painted faux wood grain of this work resembles the scars one may carry through life.

HU XIAOYUAN:
One day, I found a chunk of wood that looked as if it had been abandoned. I could tell from its cross section that someone had used a very powerful chainsaw to cut it up—that’s why it was messily sawed and had multiple deep and intersecting cuts on it. At the time, they looked like laceration scars to me.

So, I got myself a piece of raw silk fabric that was light and thin, almost translucent. I stretched it over the chunk of wood and traced and painted all those scars with my ink brush. By doing so, all of its wood grain and growth rings were brought to light.

NARRATOR:
The piece of fabric that the artist drew on is called xiao, which is woven from raw silk. Its thin and smooth texture can have a calming and soothing effect, but to get to the result harm must come to the silkworms.

HU XIAOYUAN:
Living cocoons first have to be boiled to death before the spinning and reeling of silk fibres can take place. This might seem like a quiet process, but those cocoons are in fact having their lives taken away from them bit by bit. As individuals, they’ve been deprived of things in life that they’re supposed to have.

NARRATOR:
The gap between school and society shook Hu deeply as soon as she graduated from art school. Overwhelmed by a feeling of loss and distress, she began to find herself empathising with things around her that were victims of brutality.

HU XIAOYUAN:
I don’t think brutality will ever cease to exist within the structure of society. But everybody is making efforts to ease the excruciating pain it brings. And for pain this immense to be bearable, you need something to soothe the wound. For me, wrapping things is a way to have this kind of paradox alleviated and exposed all at once. It’s the way I understand the world.

NARRATOR:

The sculptural work Untitled was created by Hu Xiaoyuan in 2008 using wooden frames and silk. It consists of two rectangular sculptures, each measuring about 160 centimetres high and 101 centimetres wide. They hang on the wall side by side.

One of the sculptures is a vertical rectangular white wooden frame with a piece of white silk stretched over it. The silk is thin, translucent, smooth, and wrinkle-free. The strips of wood that make up the frame is about as wide as the narrow side of a credit card. You can see the wood grain on the frame’s surface. Stepping closer, there are line patterns painted in black on the silk that look almost identical to the wood grain underneath them. The wood grain is a combination of dense thin lines. Some of them are curves and some form concentric circles like tree rings.

The other sculpture also consists of a thin piece of white silk, but this time it is almost transparent. The fabric is sewn at the top and bottom to form tubes affixed with wooden rods, giving the work the appearance of a hanging scroll painting. Painted in the upper-middle part of the fabric and taking up almost half of the surface of the work is an image that looks like the cross-section of a tree trunk. The tree rings are visible, resembling a series of concentric circles. The rings towards the centre are further apart, while the larger rings towards the outer edge gradually become denser. They are painted in a grass-green colour with parts showing a hint of blue. Between the rings, the silk fabric's original white colour is visible.