Aike-Galleria dell’Arco is pleased to announce Wang Sishun’s upcoming solo exhibition, which will be opening on September 6 for the duration of a month. This exhibition deals with the topic of the “body,” the fruit of the artist’s reflection on the body and the ego. The title of the exhibition, “The Wrong Body,” brings to mind the religious concept of the Original Sin, and is not only the exhibition title but also the titles for the five works presented. Wang Sishun deploys the “body” as a medium and language of creation, and investigates this theme in ways that are both separate and mutually referential.

Just as God created Man, who becomes God’s masterpiece, an artist equally plays the role of a Maker in the process of creation. Wang Sishun created a model of Man by biting the shape out of a piece of gold, thereby using his own body to mold another body—which has a coincidental aptness to it. Just as Adam and Eve’s theft of the forbidden fruit is regarded as the cause of the Original Sin, Wang Sishun hoped to express, through art, human’s basic, fundamental desires. He will create, on-site, an expressive sculpture made of mud, inspired by an amorous experience on his travels.

The long course of human civilization and progress has always been accompanied by a deep potential of crisis. In the process of creation, Wang Sishun examines the sinful, guilty side of human nature through the alienation of the body: he places in the exhibition space all kinds of bodily remnants, powder, and debris in an installation, which is connected to a dream he once had about his body disintegrating into pieces. Another of Wang’s dreams was about how he tripped while walking in the dark; the moment he looked down, he saw his own head on the floor. The artist transformed this dream into a sculpture filled with a religious sense of foreboding and tragedy.

Whether as original sin or the “wrong body,” in the end the “body” requires redemption or self-validation. Inside the small exhibition hall, on the wall opposite to the window hangs a photograph that Wang Sishun took of the scene outside. In the photograph, a man stands far off in the distance; at anytime throughout the exhibition, when the viewer turns around and looks out into the distance through the real window, that man will still be standing there.