Wen Liu b. 1985, Shanghai (China) | Lives and works in Brooklyn (USA)

Wen Liu begins from within the body, sculpting the invisible architecture of pain and preservation. Liu’s mixed-media sculptures resemble bone structures, like the butterfly shape of two rounded halves coming together to form a pelvis. Their structures originate as Rorschach inkblots, which are turned into drawings, then painstakingly hand-sculpted from water- and oil-based clay before a mother mold is made to cast their shape. The original sculpture never survives, becoming a metaphor for a creature shedding its skin — something must be destroyed in order for something new to be created.

The negative spaces between the bones are filled with a resin mixture containing Chinese herbal prescriptions. Liu began seeing a traditional Chinese medicine doctor to alleviate her health conditions, embedding each tincture into her sculptures to document her health through- out her life. These prescriptions reflect her ongoing struggle with the articulation of pain: “How well you can articulate your pain determines how accurate your diagnosis will be.”

The process is regimented and unforgiving — each resin layer is poured in six-hour increments, and areas are sectioned off before new colors are added. The works call back to the ancient lost-wax casting process, in which a wax casing is burned away to reveal a hollow mold, and to archaeological practice, in which specimens are cast in amber resin for preservation and study. While the resulting sculptures carry futuristic and alien sensibilities, their symmetry insists on something human.

— Sigourney Schultz