Shen Yuan

“A frozen, wine-coloured tongue carved from ice hangs down over a metal spittoon. The tongue is suspended, like a sheet of glass, frost-bound and hard. As warm currents of air circle around it, the frigid organ softens and yields, melting, drop by drop, into the metal spittoon. Drop by drop, the melting ice drips into the waiting spittoon until the glint of metal, reflecting through the water hits your eye. In time, the frosty tongue thaws only to reveal the blade of a kitchen knife, sharp and pointed. Perdre sa salive [Waste your breath] (1994), an installation piece composed of frozen tongues, kitchen knives and metal spittoons, like many of Shen Yuan’s works, is concerned with the transformation of images and objects from one state to another. Like the Chinese expression of ‘finding reincarnation in another’s corpse’, Shen Yuan takes everyday objects and materials and invests them with new lives and meanings, translating the mundane into the extraordinary. In Perdre sa salive, objects and materials are transformed into something other than themselves but, like the spittoons that gather the melted ice, the residue of the original material remains. Here, the role of the artist is not that of a magician conjuring new forms from old, nor that of an alchemist transforming base metal into gold. Rather, the artist acts as translator, reinterpreting elements of the physical world into new visual metaphors that often refer back to the previous condition of these materials and back also to spoken language and, in particular, to colloquial proverbs and sayings. ‘To lose one’s spittle’ in Chinese is to be excessively modest or submissive but here the unassuming image of drooling tongues dissolves itself into the spectacle of sharpened knives. In a subtle inversion of the original meaning, Shen Yuan’s icy tongues ‘lose their spittle’ only to acquire the trappings of imminent violence.

But Perdre sa salive is also concerned with the limits of language: the cul-de-sac of clichéd proverbial sayings; solid as ice; at another moment, they have melted and metamorphosed into another state. Perhaps, they might be seen as the ‘leftovers of translation’, all the things that are left unsaid or nuances of language that inevitably remain untranslated. Invoking the untranslatable should not be seen as a melancholy exercise. On the contrary, it offers the possibility of a dynamic exchange between artwork and viewer that leaves the work open to continuous interpretation andreinterpretation. Shen Yuan’s works articulate what Sarat Maharaj calls the ‘leftover inexpressibles of translation’, demonstrating ‘an attentiveness that opens onto an erotics and ethics of the other beyond its untranslatability’.”

From ‘Shen Yuan: The Leftovers of Translation’, first published in Shen Yuan, London: Iniva, in collaboration with Arnolfini, Bristol, 2001. It accompanied the first major exhibition of Shen Yuan’s work in the UK which was shown at Arnolfini, Bristol, and Chisenhale Gallery, London, in the summer and autumn of 2001 and subsequently at the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, in winter 2001–2.