Look at people's lives from the perspective of things

◎ Yu Muyun

Exhibition: Nabuqi: Green Screen Game

Duration: March 22 – June 30, 2024

Venue: MUMU Art Museum

Nabuqi, a post-80s artist born in Inner Mongolia, sees sculpture as a game, believing that "everything is sculpture". "Nabuqi: A Green Screen Game", currently on view at the Mumu Art Museum, is a comprehensive review of the artist's more than a decade of exploration of sculpture and space. More than 40 works include urban space sculptures composed of minimalist geometry, miniature-like desktop installations, and pure exploration of sculptural language. The various forms of works allow us to better experience her understanding of space and composition. The different categories of works also represent several directions of Nabuqi's artistic exploration.

"Unreal" items

At first glance, Nabuqi's work is an inversion of the familiar everyday scenes: temporary spaces made from readymades, urban landscapes distilled into streamlined geometric frameworks, miniaturized objects that are usually huge into chess pieces on the table, and parts of common plants that are captured and made into realistic sculptures...... The familiar things in our lives are reproduced in a form of "defamiliarization" in her hands: the fountain of equal scale, which looks like a toy-like model, the extremely generalized urban space, the building becomes a set of three-dimensional geometric patterns, and the light box printed with a bright parrot pattern is placed in a studio-like green screen space. Nabuqi's work evokes a similar image in our memory, and at the same time makes us clearly aware of the "unreality" added to this object.

In fact, Nabuqi's work can be a bit confusing at first glance. Her creations are almost devoid of concrete content, and are presented in the form of abstraction and generalization. The nature of these works is somewhere between sculpture and installation, and because the artist deliberately arranged them in a public space, they interact with the space they are located in and the people who come to the exhibition: sometimes you feel familiar with them, and sometimes these "works" are slightly different from the ready-made objects you have experienced and remembered, and they feel strange to you. Nabuqi's work seems to be participating in a game with us: the title of the game is "The Sensory Distance Between the Familiar and the Strange in Space".

On the first floor of the exhibition hall, a large-scale sculpture "Inverted Seat", created in 2024, is placed. The inverted Roman column pavilion is placed in the background of the green screen at an almost impossible angle, bringing a strong visual impact to everyone who walks into the museum. This large, seemingly dangerous device can actually be sat on. This is also a common feature of Nabuqi's works: the artist hopes to interact with the viewer through these works, so that they can be like the benches in the park or the Lego in the Lego pool, which are objects that we can use every day and have fun and think about.

Miniature landscapes

Since 2018 and 2019, Nabuqi has appeared in works related to home and interior installations: in a work called "How to Become a "Good Life", there are ready-made combinations such as floor lamps and carpets. The title "How to Be a 'Good Life'" reminds us of the Pop Art masterpiece, Richard Hamilton's "What Makes Today's Families So Different and So Attractive?". In the work, Richard Hamilton cuts out the images of muscular men and gym equipment, vacuum cleaners and housewives, as well as fashionable nude women in the merchandise advertisements of the time through collage, collaging them into a picture of modern life immersed in consumerism and desire.

But Nabuqi's "good life" in the exhibition is more in line with the traditional imagination of Chinese families: green plants, coffee tables, carpets and lamp stands are objects that are used every day. The artist prints realistic scenes on the covers, which are then used to cover the furniture, creating a sense of somewhere between the real and the absurd. China is a big manufacturing country, and large-scale production allows us to buy the same model in large quantities. Everything in How to Be a Good Life looks familiar, and we can all find it at home. But the way they are combined is unfamiliar, and it looks like a temporary show room in a shopping mall to display its wares. Could the life scene of such material abundance and the accumulation of goods displayed in this work lead directly to happiness?

Regarding the distance between sculptures, objects and people, Nabuqi said: "I hope that the relationship between sculptures and objects in this exhibition and people is a more intimate, intimate, and interdependent relationship. You can sit in a chair and look at some of the things and spaces around you. In this way, the relationship between the audience and the exhibition has changed. In a part of the realm between the strange and the familiar, it has always been in such a back and forth, middle ground. ”

As a result, Nabuqi reduced the public landscape, which normally looked large, to a size that could be viewed and played with on a table. This is the case with the fountain that can flow water on display in the exhibition. The petal-shaped pool is adorned with a simple sculpture of a water bottle in its arms, from which water flows and spills onto the pool – the size of which makes it look like a model or a souvenir. Other works on display in the exhibition, such as Roman columns, park trees, and buildings, have been transformed into a set of combined pieces in a board game. We can sit down at the table and use these ready-made chess pieces to build the perfect picture of our ideal city.

For the control of volume, the appropriation of ready-made objects allows people to discover the unknown side of these daily encounters. Like Nabuqi said, the size of an item determines how you treat it. "When you shrink the size of a large outdoor fixture and move it indoors, it becomes something that you can watch and play with indoors, a bit like people making bonsai. "The first cognition is determined by intuition, and then by the experience, knowledge, and emotions that arise when interacting with it—this is Nabuqi's unique paradox of simulation.

Observe from the perspective of things

In addition to directly scaling the size of objects, Nabuqi's other category of work focuses on exploring the pure language of sculpture. Another group of her works is based on the theme of the shape and structure of the city in space, presented in a minimalist form. In "Landscape Outside Space No.4", we will see a row of city models that resemble three views stitched together, arches, towers, residential areas, and walls between urban areas, and the urban volume of thousands of cubic meters is condensed into a set of cubic shapes in Nabuqi's works. These works are sculptures, but they have the characteristics of graphic design, like the geometric composition of space, removing some redundant appearance and decoration, leaving only the most simple geometric skeleton.

Combined with the author's other works, this approach and generalization also reminds us of the Bauhaus's style of treating architecture, space and human habitation as one, and strongly demanding the integration of form and practical function. On the other hand, these buildings, isolated from each other and always at a distance, remind us of Giacometti's sculptures. Giacometti has also focused on the creation of figures who are isolated and helpless in empty squares—his work reflects the situation of human beings in modern urban life: lonely gatherings, but there is always an irreconcilable barrier between individuals.

Nabuqi's work, however, rarely shows specific people. At that time, it was not so much that we did not see a single protagonist in these works, or that we did not see a dominant person living in them, but people have always existed. The city itself is the product of human life, and family life is the integration and arrangement of space in the smallest unit, and human life itself is a process of continuous communication and feedback. Nabuqi's works re-view human life from the perspective of objects, and encourage us to create new feelings and connections with these familiar and unfamiliar objects by changing perspectives and distances.

Photo courtesy of Mumu Art Museum

(Beijing Youth Daily)