Mandy Zhang Art presents If it does not break it will bend, a dual exhibition showcasing the work of Chinese artists Xu Dengqian and Fan Bangyu. Ranging from video to installation, sculpture, and photography, Xu and Fan’s practices are characterised by works that at first appear erratic on visual and narrative levels. The artists seek to dismantle the superstructures that shape our social subjectivities, such as categorisations of gender and class and the workings of state power. Throughout, Xu and Fan’s works embark on a complex play between culturally specific metaphors, sarcasm, autobiography and social critique, often encouraging viewers to question the nature of societal norms and human behaviour.
Xu and Fan engage in literal and poetic deconstructions through their use of readymades. Scattered around the gallery, Fan’s installations build on the artist’s usual practice of reconfiguring found objects into sonic and kinetic assemblages. Instruments, clothing, and sound recorders are combined with organic materials which intertwine or collapse into each other to form sculptures in varying states of decay and disrepair. Part-deconstructed piano, Fan’s sculpture from their New Angel series (2024) personifies the artist in a blend of animal body parts, steel rods and leather belts. The angel is armed with a pair of boxing gloves and suspended from the ceiling, obliquely referencing the artist’s body. Through its form, New Angel reflects on the artist’s complex relationship to gender identity and its physical manifestations. The sculpture offers an alternative anthropomorphism while elevating the discarded, the overlooked and the rejected. This simultaneously pulls viewers in and faces them with a disquieting entity, prompting them to question their value systems and consider suppressed desires within themselves.
Xu similarly distorts ordinary objects in his recent sculptures, where he has deformed rulers by hammering, screwing, and bending. Rulers are not only used to standardise the appearance of objects in tangible world, but they have a standardised appearance themselves that makes them universally recognisable. By manipulating their properties, Xu disrupts viewer’s expected encounter with a familiar object, thus visualising the workings of normativity.
The artist further challenges normativity in his video works, which present seemingly banal actions executed in a repetitive fashion. Dialogue and narrative are replaced by bizarre, staged occurrences such as lighters igniting themselves, chairs being hauled at empty spaces, or the artist flipping pancakes through the streets and trains of London. Xu’s videos irrupt the everyday, making us aware of agreed-upon social norms of how one should behave in public. Thrust into Xu’s uncanny reality, we are invited to question why it is that everyone shares a way of interacting with the spaces around them.
As our sense of uncertainty increases, a growing liminality underpins the exhibition. The works presented are half- tools, half- ‘things,’ half- destroyed, half- constructed, always oscillating between a sense of violence and a sense of invitation. Movement, experienced through Fan’s kinetic works and Xu’s tensed sculptures builds up exhibition goers’ anticipation. We are set on edge and further pushed off it by the inviting motifs of candy and lures, which visualise our hidden desires and fetishes. Xu further offers a reflection on lust and human motivations by setting traps and replacing baits with money.
At the core of the exhibition is an attempt by the artists at overturning our belief systems. We are faced with unpredictable and often unintelligible works which reject narrativity in favour of sensory experience as an alternative mode of knowledge production. In a way, the characteristic bareness of Xu and Fan’s installations makes them appear as rudimentary machines or machine parts, making the installations indexical to the artists’ ideological deconstructions. Xu and Fan fundamentally change their found objects, but, throughout, each element that has been assembled is visible. The artists become reverse architects, revealing the scaffolding of thought that prompts us to take on received understandings of power and unquestioned submission.