It is an form of power relations that are highlighted in The Weight of Creature’s Attack (2011) presented in the group exhibition Micro Life at the Soka gallery in the 798 Art District. The sculpture is comprised of a standard electric retail scale with condoms filled with mastodon tusk powder stacked on top. The bulbous sacks look to me vaguely like tusks, while carrying obvious phallic and breast connotations. The work incorporates the discarded waste from a rare and collected material, assigning a specific but meaningless measure of its weight. Collecting, the acquiring of the rare or novel, sometimes for extraordinary amounts of money, is here seen as based on a set of arbitrary values. The same precious material of the tusk carvings is repacked by the artist as an ambiguous consumer item of uncertain use. In the work, the condom acts as container and the tusk powder as content. Both flexible and stubborn, they cohabit in constant tension and agreement, acting as the receptor and the initiator of reshaping. Through his manipulation, the condom becomes the cover of the residue of a massive land animal, while the tusk powder fills the most common tool in helping humans to isolate sex from procreation. In this juxtaposition, the ghosts of sexual experience — pleasure, invasion, or indifference — take a new shape, and ironically contest the idea that everything can be measured, compared, and eventually valued.

... Xiao Yu is less involved in isolated and introspective studio ruminations than he is in an immediate engagement with world around him from which he borrows directly. Borrowing not only found objects, but as well, patterns of our regular exchange with the material world. Our initial response to the Weight of Creature’s Attack is as it would be at any fruit stand: we need to see the weight of the object. Only afterwards do we realize how little this precise measurement does to solve the question the works seems to be posing. I believe much of the tension, so common to our experience of his work, comes from the play between the immediately familiar and entirely foreign that are so often simultaneously present.

excerpted from Gordon Laurin's "Reordering the Familiar: Four Recent Projects by Xiao Yu"

The Weight of a Biological Attack

ready-made

condoms, mammoth tooth, electronic balance

dimension variable

2011

Exhibition:

Micro Life, Soka Art Center, Beijing, June 25–August 7, 2011.