Deviation
Li Shan
李山
Production date
2017
Object Detail
Media
cast silicone, plastic, natural and synthetic fibres, paint
Measurements
dimensions variable, each figure approximately 170 x 230 x 190 cm
Notes
Li Shan’s critique of anthropocentrism enters highly contested territory, asking us to consider the impact of human agency in the natural world, and our obliviousness towards other ‘lesser’ species. He wonders what would happen if genes were allowed to express randomly, if the processes that control genetic transcription and translation could be disrupted. The result might be a monster, says Li, but it would be a completely ‘free being’. In 2012, Taipei’s Museum of Contemporary Art presented a survey of Li Shan’s work in speculative biology since the 1990s. The exhibition included his journals, concepts, plans and diagrammatic representations of intended interspecies projects. To some viewers this seemed a twenty-first century version of the Shan Hai Jing, an ancient Chinese text that included impossible monsters. Li Shan covered the external walls of the museum with 200,000 artificial dragonfly wings, a characteristically paradoxical focus on the dignity and beauty of living organisms that simultaneously recalls the collection, killing and classifying of insect species for study and display. The motif of the dragonfly appears once again in Deviation (2017), a group of life-sized hybrid figures cast in silicone, half dragonfly and half naked man. The hairy legs and translucent wings of the insect, and its bulbous head, contrast with the vulnerable pale human limbs that hang beneath it, yet to Li Shan the figure is not grotesque, but instead a beautiful biological possibility.
Accession number
2017.019