‘Chair’, 2019
Wu Gaozhong
Wu Gaozhong, ‘Chair’, 2019
COURTESY: © The Artist & Sun Media / Reviving Craft
THIS FRAGILE WHITTLED chair is an emblem of vulnerable resilience. It is all that remains of an antique chair salvaged by Chinese artist Wu Ghaozhong from a flea-market and then subjected to a process of what the artist calls, “slow-killing knife marks.” Despite the ravages of his precise chiselling, the original calm dignity of the simple vintage chair, its design reaching back through history, remains intact. The zigzagging profile of the limbs suggests a febrile contemporary anxiety that almost overwhelms, but does not break, this archetypal structure.
‘Chair’ will be shown next week in Reviving Craft: Reflection of the Mind, an exhibition of Chinese craft at Somerset House mounted as part of the London Design Festival. Co-curated by Su Dan, Deputy Director of the China National Arts & Crafts Museum and China Intangible Cultural Heritage Museum, and Yang Lan, journalist, curator, entrepreneur and Chairperson of Sun Media Group, the show presents the craft heritage of China as something living – not a preserved artefact, but an evolving conversation between tradition and contemporary design practice. The exhibition sets out to define what craft means in a specifically Eastern context, drawing on Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism to suggest that objects are not simply made to serve a function, but, as the press release suggests, “thought into existence, carrying the inner life of their maker.” The middle section, where ‘Chair’ appears, concerns itself with Xiuxin, or the concept of refining the mind through self-discipline, with carving in many ways the ultimate metaphor for the psychological and moral activity of self-fashioning. This section emphasises the intimate relationship between the crafted object and the cultivated self, with craft itself a practice of becoming.
Wu, who graduated from Nanjing University of the Arts in 1990, is a photographer, sculptor and performance artist. A contemporary Daoist, since 2000 he has increasingly integrated the methods of performance art into his broader art practice, so that meditative action becomes part of an internalised material language. For the series of work titled ‘Home’, which includes ‘Chair’, he has gathered together a whole inventory of furniture items, each of which has been subjected to the same process of almost-terminal reduction, so that what remains is barely a wraith or skeleton of the original. As such, they cannot help but evoke the ancient Chinese method of torture or execution known as Lingchi, banned in 1905, which sought to prolong the agony of the condemned by slow cutting. ‘Chair’ survives however, offering a brittle precious continuity between past and future.
Reviving Craft: Reflection of the Mind, Somerset House, as part of the London Design Festival, 16-27 September 2026.
