Something peculiar seems to grow on the tops of Nabuqi’s (b. 1984, Ulanqab/Beijing) six thin, yellow stainless-steel columns, which form the work A View Beyond Space No. 7-12 (all works 2015). One of them resembles a house, while the other a fence, a high-rise building, or some amoebic creature yearningly reaching up toward the sun. A View Beyond Space No. 5 is a towering, triangular, green wall where the slanted edge is not smooth but takes the form of a staircase whose steps are too small for any human to walk on. Meanwhile, A View Beyond Space No. 4 is a long, black plank of bronze with an abstracted landscape of sorts that brings to mind trees, houses, and a railroad, supported by three stainless-steel triangles whose scale reminds us of our human size.
Nabuqi often works with sculptural forms, and plays with exaggeration and miniaturization of sizes to accentuate the works’ unusual spatial relationship to the human body. Although the imaginative objects allude to forms we are familiar with in everyday life, our bodies relate to these forms in more than one way. The steps and landscape in Nabuqi’s work are often too small for us to move through, yet some parts of these sculptures, such as its bases, or height, are to human scale; some are even on a monumental scale. We can only access these spaces and views visually and through our imagination, as well as the traces of the artist’s hand that shaped the sculptures before they were cast into bronze.
The long train rides that Nabuqi is required to take from Beijing to return to her hometown in Inner Mongolia has also shaped her experience and imagination of landscape, perspective, and time. In the artist’s own words, “These views are abstracted imaginations of spatial transformations, and not of specific places. The edges of these views represent the fragmented interceptions of the sceneries, as well as the completion and the termination of these works.” MW
self-presentation:
School library, a Brancusi catalogue
The first time I made out of clay out of clay, like my hand
In a religious gathering, I saw a female disciple’s back, kneeling on the long stairway, palms together, back bent into a bow, like a stone in the glare of sun
Julio Cortázar's short story collection
On the train back home, the desolate deserted scenery outside of the window
The environment I live in, the outskirts of a Chinese city
