ART CITIES:Paris-Shen Yuan
Using sculpture and installation, Shen Yuan’s work ranges from monumental site-specific interventions to intimate, visceral objects. Her work transforms everyday objects into poetic but often disturbing meditations, touching on questions around migration, memory and language. “Art for me is a way of finding reincarnation in another’s corpses to reveal the latent language of the material, to breathe life into inanimate things, make useless things useful and useful things useless”.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Kamel Mennour Archive
Shen Yuan was born in Fuzhou, China in 1959, and became involved in radical avant-garde art movements in Xiamen in the late 1980’s. Together with her partner, Huang Yong Ping, she immigrated to France, and has lived in Paris since 1990. In 1999, Shen Yuan was a professor of the Research Program at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu, Japan. In August 2000, Shen Yuan undertook an artist’s residency in Bristol, since then, she has been based in China and France. Shen Yuan’s art practice also reflects her personal experience of migration, the struggle of changing languages and culture in her 30’s, with a profound examination of complex gender roles within the new culture where she has located herself. Her works and subjects are also related deeply within childhood memories. The central piece in the exhibition, at the Galerie Kamel Mennour “Étoiles du jour”, is an installation made up of a light box stuck over with resin shapes representing the eyes of different animals. Shen Yuan has suggested that these eyes might be thought of as “Reflections of the light of the cosmos”. As she reminds us, “Man perceives the world by day, animals by night”, beyond appearances, the borders between the two worlds are above all projections. One can easily take the place of the other. Like hockey discs sliding over a slippery surface, these eyes are encircled however by metallic fence, as if in a prison yard. As with the melting of the glaciers evoked in “Dérives”, here Shen Yuan treats the question of displacement: the migratory movements of the past and present, but also the mobility of opinions, the volatility of political decisions. For the artist, migrant populations are like so many people “Lucidly dreaming” of an elsewhere, who are on the move by necessity, looking for more clement places, possible refuges. Borders are a constraint that oppose the natural need for displacement felt by humans as much as by animals. Differences of language, culture, and habits often provoke doubt and fear, and get in the way of hospitality and trust, like so many invisible boundaries. This question of perception can also be encountered in “Aveugles”, a work in which Shen Yuan proposes an analogy between different forms of life. By hollowing out the pupils of five resin eyes, the artist makes room for chance textures and patterns evoking nature. These pieces of glass flow together like a river in movement. A series of drawings ironically draws our attention to this persistent need of ours to create such distinctions, and so to discriminate.
Info: Galerie Kamel Mennour, 6, rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris, Duration: 11/12/15-23/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.kamelmennour.com
