April 1, 2025 |
On a Thursday evening at the end of September last year, during the week that straddles London Fashion Week and Frieze London, the main space at the Sarabande Foundation’s Haggerston base was filling up with people: a mix of friends of the artist, music people, fashion designers, art lovers, curators, musicians, dancers, DJs and artists, East End regulars curious to see something new and unexpected – the usual Sarabande suspects. We were there to attend the artist Lulu Wang’s first solo exhibition, a culmination of her year-long residency at the foundation, which featured drawings, sculptures and a 75-minute performance.
Wang, 33, is a pioneering artist, one who’s breaking new ground with her practice. She questions what it is to be human, now and in the future, plays with time and space and, she says, “explores the body as a vessel and a shifting space that forms the shape of human identity”. She explains: “This blending of the impossible and the real, the logical and the abstract are at the heart of my work.”
Photography courtesy of Yiling Zhao. The artist Lulu Wang performs ‘Human Puzzle’ at the Sarabande Foundation with dancers Louisa Fernando, Harri James Eiffert and Jose Funnell
Wang and three other dancers wove in and around the guests. The centrepiece of the show, Bridge, was a large-scale sculpture of two bodies merging into one, locked together for ever, human in form but architectural and monumental, the surface glinting in the light. The ambient musicscape around us was produced by sound artists HforSpirit and Nexcyia. Wang had even created her own cocktail, which was mixed with edible dark metallic glitter that made you feel as though you were somehow consuming the very material she had used to create her work. For an hour or so, time slowed down, as the edges of the digital and the physical blurred into one.
For Wang, it’s the interplay between the dancers and the audience that completes the work. She likes the attendees to move around and find different viewpoints, much as we do in life. In one corner of the space was Forest, an intriguing installation of mouldings of legs, surreally truncated to show only the knee down, the folds of a trouser or structured boot in silhouette as part of the silvery rippled machine-made surface. You are not sure where the body ends and the clothes begin or even if this is real or a VR simulation. On a metal shelf sits a small-scale sculpture, a body cocooned in on itself, a head tucked between knees, an amorphous, intimate, molten ball of otherworldliness. It’s called A Secret Between Me and Me. The same person was scanned and then separated into two bodies merging into one, having a conversation with itself. There’s a sense of loneliness, a vulnerability, that draws you to it.
The exhibition, called Human Puzzle, was curated by Jessica Wan, who explores ecology, technoscience and contemporary non-Western practices. With Wang, she set out to question what it means to be human now. “Human Puzzle takes us on a surreal, experiential journey of body forms exploring the potential of becoming a hybrid, a rock, a tree or a bridge,” read the exhibition notes. Wang is inspired by the architecture of Zaha Hadid, the sculptures of Henry Moore and the choreography of Pina Bausch and Michael Clarke – she describes this as “storytelling without speaking”, which she has adopted as her language.
from left: Wang in Prototype Lulu X, photographed by Johann Spindler; Wang in performance piece ‘The Ode’
I visited Wang a few times in her studio in the run-up to the show. Each time, the space would have a few new puzzle pieces fresh from the 3D printer made from rolls of shiny silver PLA filament, a plastic material made from renewable sources like sugar or corn starch that was stacked up on the metal shelving. Ever resourceful, she managed to get support from 3D printing companies Snapmaker and Kexcelled, as well as sponsorship from WePresent (the arts platform of WeTransfer). Each piece was slightly different from the next, meticulously calculated so that they would slot together perfectly, some with magnets moulded inside, feats of mathematical precision and digital craftsmanship.
“It made sense to ask what is a hybrid identity in the future,” says Wang, who is interested in how we can embrace new technology as part of ourselves. An arm cuff was her first foray into digital sculpture and 3D printing. It was made for a project performed at Whitechapel Gallery in 2023 called Lulu X, which aimed to detect her movement and create a soundscape. It was the first time she had brought technology into her work. She sees parallels with her inspirations from the worlds of sci-fi and video games like Ghost in the Shell, or cyberpunks. “It’s very interesting to think about what is a human being, if we are not organically 100 per cent by ourselves [in the universe], to combine with other parts or other technologies and extend our humanity or human soul into it.”
I ask how she found this connection between technology, dance and sculpture. “I started with performance first and “My 3D printer is like a little assistant, a mini-me doing the work” found these intangible moments always disappeared too fast. When a performance is gone, it’s gone, [but] there’s always a part of me that wants to be able to hold that moment of the story and hold my characters, hold the relationship.” She started to use sculpture as a form of physical embodiment, a more truthful way of capturing moments of a performance than photography. “When we look at someone, we look at different things. When I look at you, it’s different from how another person is looking at you. So I want people to be able to build this real connection when they look at my work.”
Wang in performance piece ‘The Ode’
Wang explains that she does a lot of scanning very simply, using her phone when she finds a pose or a shape of the body, or if people are wearing something that makes the shape interesting. “I do a casting and put them in my database, then when I take them out in a digital space I play around with the software. I will see it more like a landscape or architecture and put them together.” The end result can be quite abstract and play tricks with your mind. It’s a body but not quite as you know it. There are tendrils, roots, strange distortions, disturbing proportions. As well as the body itself, it’s about how the body is dressed – Wang regularly works with stylists including Nicola Neri, who dressed the dancers for Human Puzzle in a cool mix of Rombaut, a.v. vattev, René Scheibenbauer and MM6 Maison Margiela. The space around the body and how we share it with other people, she says, “crosses over each other, against each other, in harmony or destroying each other”. There is always tension. “They are from the live shape I took from the real world and then I throw them into the digital world. Yeah, this is basically the interesting part of building a conversation between digital and physical spaces and the material itself.” Once she has found a form that interests her, she sends it to Lulu X – her name for the printer she describes as “like a little assistant, a mini-me doing the work”.
“I am using my imagination or observations to reshape my world,” she told me. “That’s why some of the sculptures look like a rock or a tree.” It’s about modification, how the human body can, for example, “be converted into a Pokémon shape. I really like that, because that’s also the influence of how we see ourselves to be in the spiritual world.”
Wang graduated from the RCA’s Contemporary Art Practice MA in 2019. Like the printer, she’s in constant motion, always busy, always focused, very determined. Wang is interested in the idea of identity and our relationships with ourselves as well as each other. “I believe identity is not always stable,” she says. “We change all the time, so there’s always this influence to reshape ourselves with or without our consciousness. We are the mirror that reflects the environment itself as well. It’s not just about taking a shape from a real body but also seeing myself there.”
‘Forest’, a 3D-printed sculpture from Wang’s exhibition at the Sarabande Foundation
A few months after our first conversation, I sit down with Wang in the quietest corner we could find in a busy, bustling Soho House to hear about what happened after the show, and to talk about how an artist exploring a world both tangible and abstract makes her way in the world. She had found a new studio space after her Sarabande residency ended, an interim location in an office block on nearby Shaftesbury Avenue. A whole floor is taken over by the organisation Bow Arts, which shortlisted Wang for the East London Art Prize in 2023. This unexpected Soho location, one of the organisation’s many repurposed spaces, is used by artists to meet people, show and make work. It’s a deconstructed 1980s-style open-plan office floor with jazzy carpet tiles and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over Soho and beyond – a very different vibe to the Victorian canalside brickwork of the stable Haggerston building where Wang had spent the last year. Her Bridge sculpture looks completely different in this environment, even more alien in juxtaposition with the sterile office. It makes you realise that it wouldn’t look out of place as a piece of art in a commercial setting. It holds its own.
“Since I’ve been re-rooting myself from Shanghai to London, my whole experience has been shaped by how I was influenced by the culture here, by people here, and also with my practice,” says Wang. After getting a graduate diploma at the RCA, she started her master’s degree in 2019 and, just a few months in, the pandemic happened. “I had to deal with the problem about distance with people that you’re close to, like family and friends,” she says. At the same time, it was a form of detox, a new start. “It let me allow myself to take time to reflect on my past experiences.”
Growing up in Shanghai, Wang played a lot of baseball, though she started with volleyball. She was a talented athlete so ended up training for the national baseball team for up to eight hours a day but soon realised she wasn’t enjoying it. “I was always drawing comic [book] characters,” she says, so begged her mother to transfer her to art school. “I started watching romantic teenage manga then, of course, [the TV versions of] Sailor Moon or Pokémon.” At high school she discovered One Piece and then JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Those manga worlds shaped how she visualises things, even down to the exaggerated angles of the camera or the graphic styles. She knew then she wanted to “be an artist. I wanted to do creative things, and I wanted to do something with my body.” After getting a visual arts degree back home, Wang worked as a graphic artist doing branding. But she knew she wanted to develop her practice further and applied to the Royal College of Art.
3D-printed sculptures from Wang’s exhibition at the Sarabande Foundation; from left:‘Whispers, Breathing Through You’; ‘Bridge’
In London, contemporary dance workshops were a great way for Wang to continue to use her body – this time to express herself. “It let me meet lots of peers and amazing artists and dancers, and eventually we started working together.” Wang co-founded Diasporas Now in 2021 with artists Rieko Whitfield and Paola Estrella. Diasporas Now is a live art platform spotlighting global majority artists and connecting cross-cultural and multidisciplinary communities through performance and live art. As well as creating opportunities for artists from the diasporas to perform, it has also been a support network, particularly in the wake of Black Lives Matter and Covid. Wang is currently working on the artist talk programme Speaking Futures with Diasporas Now in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts and curator Hannah Geddes. This year-long commission will feature talks, performances and workshops that position artists as catalysts for imagining and shaping the future. “I prefer movement with storytelling,” she says. “I realised I was able to communicate without speaking.” It’s not about how good you are at dancing, she says. “It’s about how deeply you understand humanity and relationships.” Her 2023 performance of her work Love at a ‘late’ for auction house Christie’s was inspired by Chinese mythology, a god called Yue Lao, who connected people by a thread. “People would pray for this god to bring them good marriage or a good relationship in ancient times.” The red thread connecting the dancers represented the intensity of intimate relationships.
This year Wang will be collaborating with the ICA to lead and produce a year-long talks programme for Diasporas Now. She is also discussing an upcoming project with 198 Contemporary Arts and V&A East in Stratford (which opens in May). You sense that she is using her work to help her understand the world and her place in it. But then, aren’t we all to some degree trying to do that? “I feel like my work is always trying to tell me things,” she says. “I don’t really think about how it’s going to look in the end. I’m more just letting it grow. It’s a conversation that I want to bring to everyone. Like finding different pieces of the puzzle about yourself when you put it together, it might not end up the shape that we expected, but that’s the shape we are. So we have to learn to deal with it, live with it. And love it.”
Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 74 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
