Yu Ji: “Wasted Mud”
Chisenhale Gallery
London

A single property on the row of Victorian terrace houses that leads to Chisenhale Gallery has been painted a stark concrete gray. A deliberate line bisects it from the rich golden brick of its attached neighbor, and the dark paint engulfs the building, windowsills and all. At the end of 2020, criticism of the “gray plague” spreading across London’s developing housing markets gained traction on social media. Perhaps this is the eventual fate of all of the centuries-old flats in Tower Hamlets, one of London’s rapidly gentrifying boroughs. For now, the gray house tells a story through its contrast with its neighborhood, an allegory about the delicate balance between development and community, between humans and our environment. In her London solo debut, Shanghai-based artist Yu Ji took a similar approach. “Wasted Mud” tuned into the ecologies of the canals and green spaces that flourish in the city, and examined them as a testament to the many registers of life in London.

The show’s heart was not one of Yu’s hefty and tactile assemblages, but rather a quaint trolly laden with milk cans and an electric pump, purring away in the gallery’s corner. Foraged (2019–21)—the artist’s first kinetic work— arteried the walls and ceiling of the gallery with plastic tubes, which dripped liquid from the milk cans onto the cement sculptures and concrete floor below. The liquid puddled on the ground, evoking the damp chill of a London Monday. However, this was no mere rainwater. Yu’s concoction had been infused with nameless weeds, harvested from Mile End Park and the banks of the canals that border it, just a short stroll from the gallery itself. Though Yu’s tea of weeds didn’t quite achieve the multisensory stimulation that one might have assumed, this atmospheric intervention was a highlight of the exhibition.

Lashed to the far walls on either side of the gallery, a sprawling black hammock claimed focus beneath the network of plastic veins. Woven from thick rope, golden fishnet, and a black construction tarpaulin ubiquitous on the streets of Shanghai, Jaded Ribs (2019–21) heaved with the weight of breeze block, mangled wire, and wax replicas of decorative reliefs common to historic houses in London. This collected rubble of the city’s architecture invigorated a sense of intimacy between London’s constructed and natural environments as a counterpoint to the liquid pumping overhead.

Yet this distinction between the built and the natural risks misinterpreting the way the city is actually inhabited. For Yu the body is the conduit through which the melding of these realms is experienced. Conceived of during long walks taken while in residency at the Delfina Foundation, Yu’s perspective on these separate- but-entangled aspects of the city is derived from bodily experience. This is referenced in works such as Flesh in Stone Ghost NO.8 (2021) and Flesh in Stone-Rema Rema 2001 (2020), in which the lithe forms of abridged concrete bodies seem to be caught mid-push into the space, as if they are being birthed. This sense of the yet- to-be permeated the exhibition, and even with a circulatory system latticing the walls, the vigor of life did not quite infuse this supposed collision of the architectural and the organic. Not a drop of Yu’s weedy tincture actually made it into her bed of detritus, and the muddy conditions of life remained as yet unmet.

A block over in Mile End Park, the weeds were attentively cropped. The undergrowth in its fields swirled around trees like the meticulously combed pebbles of a zen garden in the wake of a heavy-duty lawn mower. Meanwhile, in the damp beneath the Regents Canal underpass, the wall proclaimed in loud graffiti, “Freak! End all racism now!” Though upheld as the essence of the exhibition’s location, Yu’s tasteful selection of refuse was unable to convey this sense of locality. Without a nod to the vibrant social forces that palpitate throughout the city, the ability to express the spirit of the lived relationship with the environment seemed just beyond the exhibition's grasp. “Wasted Mud” manufactured the eerie ambiance of a ruin, a city vacated of its people.

• Yu Ji