For London-based Chinese artist Yijia Wu, mundane objects become the playground of the absurd. Across sculptures ranging from beguiling stone-carved eggs and pears to rock-laden suitcases made from soap, Wu transforms familiar forms into ones that are determined to behave strangely. In response to Wu’s recent feature in the Family Portrait exhibition at the Sarabande Foundation in London, this review traces the artist’s use of material and process throughout her evolving practice.
In her early works, Wu employed the mediums of video and performance to investigate the experience of migration and the body in public space. In Territory (2021), she uses chalk, rocks, and twigs to draw circles around her body across a variety of locations in China, at once a claim to ground and a quiet act of resistance. The gesture, repetitive and ephemeral, is echoed in A Piece of Land (2021), where Wu carves out a patch of land in a Beijing construction site which was previously home to migrant workers. Building layers of felt into the ground, the performance alludes to the felted walls of traditional nomadic yurts. Through embodied repetition emerges a quiet contemplation of the movement of the body across place and culture.
Wu’s recent works continue to build on her experiments with material, now centering stone, soap, and metal, while exploring her own personal experiences with migration. For Check-in Luggage (2023), Wu cast a varied collection of rocks into a suitcase made from soap, translucent and dense. In another absurdist relationship between objects, “What are we having for breakfast?” (2023), an egg slicer sits obsolete against a pair of carved stones that seamlessly mimic eggs in shape and colour.
In a pointed example of Wu’s appeal to reiteration, Se(pear)ate (2025) is the most recent version of the artist’s project to carve one life-size pear from alabaster stone every year, with three versions made so far. Each slightly different but all featuring a silver spoon as a stem, these sculptures feature muted colours in gray, white, silver and ochre, which renders them the quality of a gradually fading memory.
Through sculpture, Wu’s recent work explores the meanings we attach to objects and how they can in turn grow unobtainable via experiences of migration and cultural divides. The juicy pear, whose taste we recall from childhood, has now literally turned to stone. The suitcase we for some reason feel compelled to carry around is revealed to be full of rocks, that is at least until the suitcase itself dissolves away through use and time. What has once been is now no longer, yet their echoes remain still. Through the repeated attempt to preserve the fragments of memory, Wu’s body of work astutely meditates on the inescapable arrest of our bodies to the here and now. More: @ikeeabug
By Nevan Spier, 16th June 2025, London, United Kingdom
