Did you know that when you breathe, you prefer one nostril? Or that your eyes are your fastest kinetic muscle? How about your brain being able to reconfigure a given memory on the individual occasion you consider it? There’s also the proverbial, “your skin is the largest organ in your body!” exclamation that’s foisted on you unexpectedly and unassumingly, much like a party cracker exploding in front of your face, or a particularly cringeworthy aphorism you can find in most banal conversations. Yu Ji’s incorporeal lifeforms, on the other hand, are conceived from something else entirely separate. They are queerishly impermanent. This an inevitable consequence of their being cocooned by the body of the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci where they are anticipating to rest, neither ageing nor ageless until the eighth of September. When they pass from their sanctuary, they will no doubt be metaphorically consumed by the signifiers of passing time that has otherwise come to bedeck our human bodies with wrinkles, silver strands and loosening, sagging skin.
As Margaret Atwood once appropriately wrote from Offred’s perspective in The Handmaid’s Tale, “I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me.” Perhaps in moulding her faceless and limbless life forms out of stone, building, and organic materials, their creator sought to separate them from comparisons or connotations such as these, whether they are coincidental or not. It’s easier to believe, however, that Yu Ji simply chose to do so in order to remove them from any physical expectations we may have. In that sense, they become endlessly interpretable and ultimately, metamorphose into reflections of us, their observers, with our varying hair types, ethnicities and statures.
Presiding over them are diaphones, pieces of sheets that have been left to float overhead and the inference to a carnal indulgence of some kind isn’t ignorable, particularly given there are numerous projections, some of the body parts, staged across them in a contradictory coupling of theatricality and intimacy. Somehow, both the former and latter just find their climax in one another within the broader practice of their artist who smoothes out her creative bed sheets through interrogations of the body’s place as it moves in and out of everyday circumstances. More pertinently, these diaphanous installations, because of their inherent ambiguity, seem to encourage observers to consider the length of time they spend interpreting any given piece and the point this becomes voyeuristic. Is it so after five minutes? Ten? Twenty? The artworks within Hide Me in Your Belly certainly concentrate on balancing between the periphery of looking and looking long enough, although there’s no true measure of progressing time within this show’s space, indeed it feels like a dystopian bunker far removed from the trappings of reality with it’s shuttered ceiling, artificial lighting and dark corridors.
When considered from this perspective the various other oddities that lay strewn about the place become more symbolic as both givers and preservers of life, as especially demonstrated by the presence of a splintered piece of coral, that easily mirrors a cluster of cells as well as a pair of disconcertingly pristine surgical gloves that lie next to a weathered newspaper flipped halfway through it’s spread. Haphazardly draped across another otherwise entirely innocuous, utilitarian mantlepiece is a print of a baby. Unlike those abstract elements that float overhead, almost transcendental in their impermanence, this piece is unforgivingly sold, palpable, and alive.
