OFLUXO

Gallery Vacancy is pleased to announce Misery Whip, Sydney Shen’s first solo exhibition in Shanghai, from January 30 to March 13, 2021. Introducing in the gallery space a series of her recent sculptures and an installation that reference seemingly disparate subjects from “farmhouse chic” style home decor to historical torture devices, Shen’s drolly grim work disinters the conspiracy that is concealed within the mundane objects in history.

The title of the exhibition, Misery Whip, is sampled from the slang of two-man crosscut-saw that was commonly employed by lumberjacks before the invention of modern electric chainsaw. The poetic quality of the term comes from the physical burden caused by this specific type of heavy labor. The day-long sawing is considered truly a misery, implying the instrumentalization of the body as the one operating the tool eventually becomes part of the tool.

Inheriting the artist’s interest in the carnivalesque as a form of the macabre, Shen’s works are both enticing and horrifying. Seemingly familiar objects are discreetly transformed into sugar-coated pitfalls through the restoration of materiality as their original functionality is mischievously disarmed and twisted: a game with no way to win and no prize to gain, a container that contains its owner, or a murderous tool of labor.

In Haruspex (2021), Shen borrows the form of a “shame fiddle,” a violin-shaped historical implements of punishment for those convicted of petty crimes, and is now adapted in fetishism and body modification culture. Combining the restraint device with a toy labyrinth, Shen suggests that a “shame fiddle” victim’s attempts to break free is what controls the movements of the mirrored ball-bearings in an endless loop. This vertiginous physical struggle becomes an unavailing attempt to achieve existential emancipation. And the metal ball-bearings in the maze, an important part of this gaming mechanism, correspond to the pathological stones in human body. In Cicatrix (2021), the artist substitutes them with carved dinosaur gastrolith stones, contrasting the everyday quality of marbles with the enigmatic prehistoric origin and huge former owner.

The mental chaos of spiraling out of control is echoed with 1st Knowing (Manifesteange Metamorphose temps de fille) (2021), which depicts a delicately decorated Longaberger table basket. The velvet-lined interior cutouts reference various surgical instruments used in cranial trephination, an often lethal Medieval medical procedure to allegedly cure madness by boring a hole in the skull. Body becomes the sacrificial lamb to the ailing mind, suggesting a violent and hostile side even to the sincerest thoughts of survival instinct.

The play between subtle seduction and vicious destruction creates a Mikhail Bakhtin’s “carnival sense of the world” contrasting daily reality that is presented as the revelry of a lethal parade. Physical body, the apparent prey of this grand persecution, is conspicuously absent in Shen’s practice, but in return, symbolically manipulated as the medium, metaphorically turned into the Misery Whip. Repetitively and consistently instrumentalized, it manifests as the whip, the whip-holder, the one being whipped, and the whipping. This persistently changing and flipping status of the body thus points to the inevitable debate of the self in our profaned world.

Sydney Shen, born in New Jersey in 1989, now lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include: Every Good Boy Does Fine, Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna, 2019; Onion Master, New Museum, New York, 2019; Four Thieves Vinegar, Springsteen, Baltimore, 2017; What’s Worse Than the Void is Matter, Motel, Brooklyn, 2017; Master’s Chambers, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, 2016; Bone Apple Tea, Holy Motors, Hong Kong, 2016. Recent group exhibitions include: Commutiny, SIBLING, Toronto, 2019; Flea Market, The Loon, Toronto, 2019; On the Use of Unknown Objects, Aldea, Norway, 2019; no body to talk to, INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York, 2019; Jane Fonda, Pina, Vienna, 2018; The Private Collection of Water McBeer, Deitch Projects, New York, 2018. Sydney Shen will have her solo exhibition in 2021 at Queens Museum, New York.