Solo Exhibition Hong Museum, Shanghai
The Hong Museum presents The Currents We Carry, a dual exhibition featuring artists Yiyao Tang and Lishuang Xu, curated by Huirong Ye, and produced by Hongzheng Pan. Since the 1980s, the evolution of the "Wenzhou Model"—an economic framework defined by family-run businesses, private enterprises, and agile market mechanisms—has fostered a networked ecosystem of collaboration and production that transcends the boundaries of geography and identity through global trade systems. This exhibition engages with Wenzhou's distinct socio-economic landscape through works that navigate the imperceptible flow lines of industrial production, trace the imprints of exchange between laboring subjects and production spaces, and map the evolving contours of migration shifts, identity folds, and social flows.
The notion of "currents" in this exhibition refers to the operational flows intrinsic to industrial production lines. A hallmark of the industrial age, the assembly line is engineered to optimize the movement of materials while fixing workers into controlled, mechanical precision, thereby instituting a logic of production driven by the pursuit of maximum efficiency. This acceleration-oriented logic of material circulation extends into the transnational allocation of capital, technology, and labor, weaving diasporic networks that bridge Wenzhou's local industries with global systems. Simultaneously, "currents" metaphorically evoke the entrenched inertia of modernization—a relentless forward momentum where each leap intensifies circulation and reduces friction, yet obscures systemic ruptures and long-term consequences.
Both artists have rooted their practices in Wenzhou's local shoe manufacturing industry. Through participation in factory operations, material experiments, and ethnographic research, they examine how industrial systems shape and constrain bodies, labor, and agency, as well as the dual mechanisms of flow and control within capitalist structures. The arc-shaped gallery of the Hong Museum is conceived as a symbolic assembly line, where Yiyao Tang's works define its architectural and infrastructural framework, coaxing materiality into narratives and memories latent within its substance. Coconut coir bricks, rebar, and die molds—industrial products reimagined—are suspended in processes of continual generation and transformation, their material properties and embedded metaphors in constant flux. Bearing witness to the collective memory of industrial labor and the historical fractures of modernization, these works disrupt and confound fixed binaries: nature and artifice, stability and precarity, order and chaos.
Lishuang Xu addresses the themes of the body, velocity, and performance in a production-driven society. Through the paradoxical interplay of movements oscillating between efficiency and inefficiency, forward and backward, accumulation and expenditure, she archives, distills, and reconfigures the repetitive yet iterative motions of assembly lines, materializing labor scenes that are both tangible and spectral. In a culminating gesture, Xu "returns" a shoebox from the museum's display to a factory assembly line, bridging the spatial and conceptual divide between the industrial sphere of production and circulation of goods and the cultural realm of discourse and event-making. Visitors are invited to situate themselves within the exhibition's flows, becoming part of the fluid process of co-constructing meaning, while the unseen labor sustaining the museum's operations quietly lingers, awaiting recognition.
Text / Huirong Ye
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