Lot 1634: SHEN SHAOMIN

SHEN SHAOMIN
(B. 1956)
Experimental Studio No.2 - Sunflower
animal bone, cast bone meal, glue acrylic and rock salt
107 x 18 x 18 cm. (42 1/8 x 7 x 7 in.)
Executed in 2005

Hong Kong, China, Frey Norris Gallery, Hong Kong International Art Fair, 14-18 May, 2008.
London, U.K., The Saatchi Gallery, The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art, 9 October, 2008 -18 January, 2009.

Saatchi Gallery, The Revolution Continues, London, UK, 2008 (illustrated, p. 46).

Beijing- and Sydney-based artist Shen Shaomin's works feature a convergence of a life-long interest in fossils and mythical creatures and modern developments in biotechnology. Shen was raised in China's remote Northern province of Heilongjiang; his father was a carpenter, and from his father Shen developed a fascination with constructed objects and armatures. Based in Australia since the 1990s, Shen was exposed to the earliest waves of mass media enthusiasm for bio- and genetic-engineering. Combining these seemingly disparate influences, Shen began creating a number of fantastic and imaginary creatures, fossils cobbled together using real and cast bones from different animal sources. The results are strange and alien creatures that could equally be relics of the past or Frankenstein-esque creatures invented in a medical laboratory.

The two Experimental Studio No. 2 - Sunflower (Lots 1633-1634) works featured here straddle those same trajectories. They are presented in antiseptic glass urns and presented like objects of natural history. At the same time, these "sunflowers" have taken on a sinister air, having grown teeth, a torso, and legs. Such objects in museums invite speculation over the past era and environment in which these animals might have existed. But what Shen offers instead is something as innocent and common as a sunflower mutated into a strange animal; as such, he invites us to consider a future that may lay before us. The selection of a sunflower may have particular metaphorical ramifications in a Chinese context. Having grown up during the Cultural Revolution, Shen would have been aware of the relationship between the sun and sunflowers as metaphors for Chairman Mao and the Chinese people, with the Chinese people represented as sunflowers who grow towards their leader. Whether or not Shen is evoking this historical memory, the "sunflowers" appear as fossils of our own aberrant environment, unnatural artifacts of a world rapidly moving into new and unimagined terrain.