Like a cicada leaves its molted shell, to follow its life circle and escape from the past world.

Presented as an unpacked box, Pack/Unpack contains leftover materials from deinstallation of art exhibitions in Shanghai, consisting with cast brass and wire brass. The project is created during a one-month residency of the Art Materials Collaborative at MACHANG, Shanghai, a factory that supports artists, galleries, and museums with productions and exhibitions.

As a consequence of the increasing demand for art exhibitions in Shanghai, tons of leftover material have been produced after installation of exhibitions. Considering leftover material eventually being wasted and disappearing, as well as the invisibility of artistic labor, this work attempts to tell the parallel between those two among the excessive art production.

With collect and arrange, the artist documents every piece of material without any reforming, and reconstruct them with thread-like hardware. Cast brass from clay, the making of thread sculpture catches the hidden shape that exists in the hollow fist, molding in a certain gesture performed by the human body and being the fastener in the work-for both functionally and metaphorically-embody the situation of artistic labor.

Based on finger combination, ‘screws’ are born in different lengths to imply the idea of standardization. With the resemblance of threads, these unusual screws draw a subtle relation between human-made standard tools and the human body.

Filling with layers of skin-like latex in the crevices, the work intentionally treats the leftover material and fastener as limb and joint, along with hollow shells woven by brass wire, it is a fragile structure, an unfolded cube, a disassembled body.