Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Svala Thórsdóttir

Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong

Paris, Espace Cardin, Paris-Pekin, October 5-October 28, 2002, p. 213, illustrated in color
Hong Kong, Hanart TZ Gallery, Vege-Pleasure, July 26-31, 1999 (with Inga Svala Thórsdóttir)
Iceland, Ingolfsstraeti 8 Gallery, The Reykjavik Art Festival, Vege-Pleasure, May 17-June 28,  1998 (with Inga Svala Thórsdóttir)

Asia Art Archive, Wu Shanzhuan: Red Humor International, Hong Kong, 2005, p. 151, illustrated in color

This work is in generally very good condition overall. There are no visible condition problems with this work. It is mounted and framed under plexiglass. It was not examined out of frame.
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Vege-pleasure was a collaborative project between Wu Shanzhuan and Icelandic artist Inga-Svala Thórsdóttir (b. 1966) completed in Hamburg, Germany, in 1995.  It is related to their earlier work Paradises (1993), which derives from a well-known woodblock print of Adam and Eve by Albrecht Dürer (1504).  Both collaborative works point towards an Edenic state of abundance, consumption, and physical satisfaction in man's perception of and relation to the vegetable world.  Vege-pleasure (Lot 67, 1999) documents a veritable orgy of vegetables, progressively rotting in various relationships of physical intimacy and imagined reproductive capacity. 

In making Vege-pleasure, the artists wished to distance the quotidian products of habitual consumption from bodily experience, making a landscape of them in their home.  In arranging their various vegetables still-lifes, the artists had in mind the decreasing bio-diversity available to the average supermarket consumer.  "There was a lot of ecological literature behind it," says Thórsdóttir, "but the products used were simply what we could afford.  The principle was to imagine that one vegetable could profit from another... that every intercourse among vegetables could be productive, that a life could start from this.  If you put a mango with a potato it's like anonymous sex, but it's a forced diversity... various things don't go together, like mango and avocado...  It became a process of observing nature, like a scientific experiment, but our results were visual and uncontrolled:  the greatest life we had was flies and mold."[1] 

Today No Water (2007, Lot 68) is part of an ongoing series of works by Wu Shanzhuan that relate to his eponymous novel, completed in the mid-1990's and obsessively revisited in drawings, paintings, and other artistic forms.  Word, image and idea collide in the Today No Water works in what initially seems a random, stream-of-consciousness outpouring.  A more thorough analysis of Wu's vast body of work, however, reveals a great many recurring motifs, related to each other and reiterated within a discernible organizational structure.  A novel originally in twenty-eight chapters, Today No Water is also "a slogan for the state of the world as experienced by Wu."[2]  In the recent work on offer, Wu returns to the color language of his earliest years - the red, black and white that characterized his conceptual practice of the mid-1980's to early 1990's, the time in which Today No Water was conceived.  Familiar Wu motifs such as the 'second hand,' the 'mono-sexual,' and the mathematics of objects populate this cryptic picture, which offers the immediacy of Wu's classic drawings on an impressive painterly scale.

[1] Metamorphosis:  The Generation of Transformation in Chinese Contemporary Art, exhibition literature (unpublished), Tampere, Finland, June - September 2007.  As a child and young adult, Thórsdóttir worked in a university's agricultural study farm on horticultural grafting.

[2] Ibid.