Last day of ‘Fortunate’
@cell_project_space , sad to see this one go
Here’s a text by
@adomas.n on the “Tease” series:
“In the front gallery, vitrine works Tease 001, Tease 002 and Tease 003 reference both luxury retail displays and Chinese restaurant decorative motifs, reusing the ornaments the artist’s grandfather crafted when her family first opened the restaurant in Italy. Steel cutting moulds for leather bags encase an organic, marble-like material composed of gelatine, glycerine, restaurant grease and soy sauce – ‘skins’ derived from Mou’s earlier work Hung Out to Dry, Holding the Bag (2025–). Pressed into the moulds, the skins push against them, shrinking and sweating over time, caught between preservation and decay. In Tease, ornament is an excess frustrating the neutrality of utility, doubling as a device of seduction, dressed in a fantasy of terror and beauty all at once.
This reuse of a ‘skin’ is pivotal to Mou’s process: the works form part of her own ‘factory’, where an earlier body (of work) is reprocessed into a new one. The factory here is subject and method, an ongoing cycle of casting, pressing, shrinking, shredding, reshaping and re-valuing. In Mou’s work, methods of preservation echo the sustaining and exhausting measures required to keep bodies and materials in circulation. Throughout Fortunate, organic, bureaucratic and phantasmic skins compound into identifications, patterns and protective projections, arranging and transforming the body in ways required but not necessarily wanted.”
