C-Space is proud to present the first solo exhibition of the young Chinese artist Yu Ji.
The making of works itself is for Yu Ji a process of understanding what art is and what it means to her. It’s not a conceptual strategy but a necessary process of practice and reflection. As anyone raising a small child would appreciate the regularity of everyday life, Yu Ji practices art as a basic and uneventful exercise, something repetitive, unglamorous but indispensable. Trained as a sculptor, Yu Ji is fixated on the idea of sculpting something out of time and space, with the use of a minimal sum of materials. It’s important for her to be involved in the making of the work in a literal sense. She makes them with her own hands, devoting her time and attention to the last detail. Being an artist is not just a profession for her, but a physical experience of actually bringing something to life.

Central to the exhibition at C-Space will be a number of sculptures from Yu Ji’s series called Public Space. Public Space is an ongoing project that marked Yu Ji’s latest interest in articulating the relationship between space and natural elements such as light in architecture. She had taken pictures of many old-styled public toilets existing in cities all over China that have been an important part of communal way of living introduced by the Communist Party since the 1940s and 1950s. Still using the small plaster cubes she made from self-made paper molds as the basic unit for construction, Yu Ji would meticulously assemble miniature structures emulating certain basic structures of those public spaces but far from being exact copies, in the same way as a child would work with Lego. In most cases, Yu Ji would give each structure a pedestal of its own, deliberately built from randomly found pieces of wood in a makeshift manner.

Yu Ji was born, raised and educated in Shanghai, where she lives and works today.