Wu Jian'an | Ten Thousand Things at Chambers Fine Art Beijing

A skeleton made of shells and an army of terracotta bricks are among the works on display in the latest exhibition of new works from Wu Jian’an titled Ten Thousand Things on exhibit at Chambers Fine Art in Beijing through July 3.

This exhibition is the fifth the Chinese artist has had with Chambers. While previous shows there were reactions to current events (such as his post-SARS show Daydreams in 2006) or inspired by arcane texts such as Journey to the West (as in 2014’s Transformation), this exhibitiontakes its title from a book by German art historian Lothar Ledderose, writing at the dawn of the 21st century.

This book, an investigation into the mass production techniques used to create such masterpieces of ancient Asia as the Terracotta Warriors in the mausoleum of the first Qin emperor, has led Wu to create works in which many individual works join together to make a collective work.

Most strikingly, this approach can be seen in the works Shallow Mountain, 2016 and Big Skeleton, 2016. The former in particularcarries associations of the 8,000 terracotta figures in Lintong District. However, in this piece, the clay comes in the form of 1,184 bricks, which have been hand-carved and engraved and arranged in rows. In the latter, Wu uses many conch shells to build a skeleton sitting cross-legged over 8-meter across and nearly 6-meter tall. In another major work featuring alongside smaller animal bone sculptures and collages featuring the artist’s first attempt at ink painting, Wu returns to making small figures from paper dipped in wax, this time joined together to create psychedelic abstract works.