. . . . . PXJ Exhibition . . . . .
BaO was commissioned to help design and built Peng Xiao Jia's solo show in the Shanghai Sculpture Museum. The artist's work being mostly small-scale and requiring a focused, almost intimate, type of attention, the 2000 sqm of raw gallery space were at first somewhat intimidating, dry, and impersonal in nature. We thus were interested in trying to primarily create a different type of "atmosphere", a more sensual environment than the typical white and hard gallery space. We decided with the artist to entirely fill-up the two levels of exhibition space with a layer of landscaping pine tree bark(10m3 in total), effectively covering the whole floor and transforming it into a soft scape.
A strong forest smell would reach the visitors upon entering the gallery ; the ground became soft, gentle and natural, moving and sinking under one's feet ; the whole lighting became dimmed, almost fainted and absorbed by the new ground condition. A series of larger than usual white pedestals were floating like islands on the carpet of pine bark. A long oblique catwalk of wooden nudes greeted the visitors at the entrance, an army of worms faced them near the main staircase, a 25m long white altar displayed the series of 18 wooden tablets, dices were rolled on an oversized table, and a series of white columns (some fake, some real) were creating an artificial field in which a series of 8 women were playing hide and seek. Those oversized counters on which the small sculptures were placed were attempts to subvert the usual figure ground relationship in sculpture display and to consider the supporting structures not in terms of classical pedestal but in terms of art platforms, tables, tracks, and columns instead.
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