Shuyi Cao and Candice Lin: The Fabulated Worlds
In the two-person exhibition Underwater, on Fire by Shuyi Cao and Candice Lin at UCCA Clay, the artists work with clay—the earthy, bodily, malleable yet tenacious material—to conjure mythological worlds where science and fiction, local cultures and global politics, interrupt and intertwine with one another. The experience of the show echoes its title, sensorially and spatially: Lin’s presentation in the ground-floor space is suffused with red light, like a kiln mid-firing; the upper gallery hosting Cao’s installation evokes the remnants of a shipwreck inhabited by water deities.
Lin’s site-specific installation Soul of the World (Iron Ouroboros) takes its form from the traditional dragon kiln of Yixing and the imagery of the ouroboros, encircling the exhibition hall. The space is darkened; fog seeps from the clay dragon’s body, permeating the air and blurring the theatrical scenery. Phones scattered across the installation play looping animations of protests but are sometimes cut off by cat memes, while the sounds of police sirens are disrupted by electronic music. The message is explicitly political—the anxiety of witnessing is clogged by messy online information, intensifying the ambiguity and uncertainty of making sense of our current global situation.
In many of Lin’s works, minerals thread through their material properties and cultural meanings. Iron, an element crucial to both the human body and the local purple clay, becomes a metaphor of resistance in Soul of the World (Iron Ouroboros). The student protests on U.S. campuses reminded Lin of Langston Hughes’s poem Kids Who Die: “the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—and the old and rich don’t want the people to taste the iron of the kids who die, don’t want the people to get wise to their own power.” Iron Ouroboros, as a symbol of transformation and regeneration, alludes to the power and possibility of making changes to the present.
The architectural structure of UCCA Clay’s upper floor—with its wooden beams, slanted ceiling, and dim interior—becomes an underwater temple in Cao’s world-making, where ancient mythologies and modern sciences encounter. Clay statues of imagined water deities—Thalacora, Ammonora, Xurthra, Siphonura, and Gorgospina—are enshrined at the center of the space, their forms merging of fossils, microorganisms, marine animals, and totems from different mythologies. In Land of Discontinuity, images of fictional hybrid creatures appear fragmented across a set of relief clay tablets, resembling archaeological remnants from an unknown era. Cao seems to question the potential flattening of discrepancies in archaeological research through the pursuit of historical continuity, and for her, deviation of established narratives is where imagination can emerge.
During Cao’s research in Uzbekistan, investigating the history of the Aral Sea, she encountered the Institute of the Sun—a futuristic infrastructure designed to concentrate solar energy. Her stained glass sculptures, Institute of the Sun #1 and Institute of the Sun #2 takes its name from the titular solar furnace, and is suspended from the ceiling and placed near the window and the staircases. Their patterns also reference scientific illustrations of green algae by naturalist Ernst Haeckel, drawing a parallel between the qualities of primitive life forms and the imperial imagination of energy accumulation.
Her video installation She From the Sky traces the disappearance of the Aral Sea, from the Soviet expeditions to today’s geoengineering on the desert landscape. The artist weaves her interviews with an archeologist, an ecologist, and an economist with water-related myths in Central Asia, creating a nonlinear narrative about human’s century-long desire to control nature.
In the video, the interviewee’s words seem to be solid and rational, yet Cao asks: Can an archeologist tell their own myth? While thinking of the mythological symbol ouroboros, Lin also recalls an anecdote: the chemist August Kekulé, in his search for the formation of benzene, had a vision of ouroboros that revealed to him the hexagonal shape of the benzene ring. In both Cao and Lin’s art-making, fact and fabulation are sometimes displaced, and sciences might dwell in the mystical and the speculative.