The exhibition opens Thursday the 20th of August, from 6-8 pm.

In Between the World is Lin Wang’s solo exhibition at QB Gallery and the latest part of her ongoing project series Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstandings. The series examines past and present seafaring cultures of the East and West, and how the mutual processes of exoticization shape these encounters. In this project, Wang’s visceral works bring these themes to the private realm of the transforming body. The result is a deeply personal exhibition.

At the centre of Wang’s project is the emblematic piece of Chinese blue and white porcelain. Traditionally, artists apply cobalt blue to white clay, painting motifs like dragons, mountainscapes and auspicious symbols. When the glazed clay is fired at high temperatures, it vitrifies and turns glossy, hard, permanent but brittle. In the present exhibition, Wang continues to explore the technical limits of her medium and adds new techniques, glazes, textures and motifs to her oeuvre.

Wang covers her porcelain vessels with motifs from both Chinese and Western traditions. Peaches and butterflies, associated in Chinese culture with happiness and longevity, appear alongside sailor tattoos of mermaids and compasses. As these images intermingle on the surface, they recall the movement of goods across the seas as well as the people, memories, cultures, and ideas that accompanied them.

Wang draws an explicit connection between the durable porcelain and the frail human body. She forcefully intervenes in her vessels by cutting, rupturing, and opening them up.

In some sculptures, Wang tears through the surfaces of seemingly traditional vases, exposing wounded interiors marked by scars and bruises. Deep cuts reveal a spine and fleshy inner tissue, elsewhere, skeletal forms are faintly visible beneath the surface. In other works, she leaves the porcelain unglazed, creating instead a skin-like texture, reddened as if bruised or sunburnt. The exposed surfaces bear indistinct tattoos, faded by time or by abrasion.

By inscribing porcelain with cobalt in a manner that echoes the marking of human skin with ink, Wang likens porcelain and flesh. The bodies are altered by acts of pressure, tearing, and inscription, leaving irreversible marks.

This exhibition is at once intimately personal and distantly decorative, a visceral and playful exploration through the medium of porcelain. Wang sees the project as being about:

[…] growing out of an old skin and into a new identity. Shedding one's skin is painful, and the new skin is soft, vulnerable, and easily damaged. Yet it is precisely in this unstable, in-between state that the self can emerge, mature, and become freer and less easily defined [writer’s translation]

Midway through the process of shedding and remaking their skins, Wang's works vitrify into commodities like other porcelains circulating from Jingdezhen in China for centuries. Wang extends this long history of cultural exchange to the human body. Her marked, pulled apart, and healing porcelain bodies make transformation tangible. From this, new forms begin to emerge.