Stars out of the heaven--queer glassware
2024
This work includes 13 bent wine glass scatteredly distributed in the room to interrogate how the altered gesture engages in socializing in a elitist environment.
Material: lead glass, glass paint
Size: variable
Whispered away
2023, 2024
Please don't trample on it! Inspired by the grass and fallen leaves Chenxi sees on the ground. Then she captures the various scattered stumbling gestures of individuals, fusing the plasticity, fragility, and transparency of glass, and making "obstacle" that mimic the texture of the gallery floor. Through the dynamic forms of irregular separation and spaced flow of groups, the artwork embodies the experience of disassociation, spreading, struggle, neglect, vulnerability and alienation of body and consciousness as subconsciously perceived in the socio-cultural divide of marginalized identity.
Material: glass, wood, stain, wood glue, ceramics, hot glue, glass glue, bronze powder, glaze
Size: variable
Ground circuit board made by a non-resident alien
2023
This work is a soft and pliable semi-transparent board made of recycled organic rubber and maize leaf cultured scoby, lying between wall and platform. This work reflects flexibility, fragility and humility with body perception and dynamic identity.This pattern of the objects symbolized a undesigned cultural route which Chenxi could identified themself with in an alien cultural context.
Material: recycled rubber, agricultural waste based scoby
Size: 37in * 28in * 0.75 in
Professor
2023
This work includes hollow hemisphere mycelium, growing and combining with disposable masks as the brim which emphasize a bizarre opening, creating a paradox by its positive and also negative body. The mycelium part is supported by an akimbo but balanced aluminum shelfwhich is secured with hair and metal adhesive, offering spacial dynamics. This body open stoward direction between mycelum growth and eyesights of the viewers, along with special scents of living mycelium. Influenced by botanical aesthetics, this ethereal, sculpture sits on its reed-like structure, manifesting an elegy for continuing life midst capitalist post-modernity and environmental issues.
Material：mycelium, mask, aluminum rods, wire, hair, wig
Size：20in*16in*16in
Centaur I
2021
This work reflects the ongoing urbanization where roadway have been widened with the shrinking green area. The works were inspired by the overlap of plant growth and spread of traffic to navigate how the boundaries of the traffic area form. Chenxi also created constructivist structure with the solid part to embody the perceptional spatial dynamics of the traffic movement. Created during the Pandemic Quarantine period, those works employed domestic labor materials and motion as a response to the constrains of the time. The way of presentation integrate arts into real-world landscape to reflect on the urbanization's influence on spatial perception, direction and aesthetics, while pushing the boundaries of traditional arts.
Material: synthetic fabric, plush cloth, cambered Guangdong gauze, woolen wire, linen, hemp rope, balloon, aluminum rod
Size：50 in * 29 in * 7 in
Untilted footprint
2024
This work reorganized influential art natural images of beings from Asia and North America in a open-cone-shaped mesh to rethink their historical travels and their influence on cultural aesthetics and perception. The natural images include Chen Zhen's rose wall in Paris, and Harold Ancart‘s grain family plants in Artforum, elephant ears model, horseshoe crab fossil and quasi-microscopic printing from a friend.
Contemplating formalism, I unconventionally organize the plant images in a centripetal way from horizontal direction to respond to the familiar perspectives of our eyeballs movements then slantingly changing. This intriguing perspectives of the organization challenges linear perspective that was considered as colonialism of Capitalist vision in Hito Steyerl’s theory ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’.
Material: chicken wire, horseshoe crab, epoxy, remelted rubber, printing, plastic elephant ear, pages from Artforum, synthetic wire, chains, aluminum wire, food dye
Size: 17in * 35in * 37in
Post-vega park
2019
The work is displayed in amusement park style to integrate the interspecific relationship with the cultural control in the forms of digital printings, installations and videos based on the mutual existence and influence of materials such as field, domestic, exotic species, exotic culture, native culture and laboratory and so on.The natural ecosystem and the social environment overlap more and more in space. They functionally blend with and control each other, thus increasing the behavioral diversity of human and environmental ecology and also continuously extending new perceptions.
Material: flies, ant bait, Dionaea muscipula, PVC tube, iron frame, cross clamp, test tube clamp, lid of three-port reaction kettle, glass plug, glass funnel, mouthpiece receiving tube, glass filter cup, watch glasses, PVC cloth, film printing, fly paste, toilet plunger, pesticide sprayer, pesticide, fly killer, herbicide, plant leaf, flower, PVC hollow sphere, frog jumping toy, flyswatter, mosquito repellent incense, aluminum wire, New English-Chinese Dictionary, coke, TV, surface, double-sided adhesive tape, remote control, switch, iron box, lettered PVC sheet
Size: variable
There is a mountain
2018
video link: https://www.chenxishao.net/thereisamountain
In China, people often say father's love is as great as a mountain because mountain is Yang representing great manliness. What I’m interested in is that the mountain formation came from eruption whereby mountain shape is like the erection of the ground. After my father passed away, I often dreamed of him. The dream began from the bed and often ended up with green mountains. In this work, I try to look for an intimate “male” role that is absent in my life, and express my memories of family life.
Material: viscose filament sheet, an irony frame of bed, cement cones, polyfoam cones, a mouldy steamed bread, a little green stool, needle, a spool of thread, a PVC shelf, an air cleaner, a wizened plant and plastic bags, an electric fan, a footboard
Size: variable
Limulus play
2024
This work is an interactive woodwork featuring a prehistorical scenario of dynamic waves, burned horseshoe crab image and a sail-shaped structure with a shell, emphasizing subtly prehistorical beauty of nature despite the commercial environment.
Material: pine wood, maple wood, pine resin, plaster, shell, horseshoe crab power, wood glue, silk
Size: 14in * 10in * 22in