Shujing Huang - (still matter)

Shujing Huang’s work within (still matter) explores aspects of trauma within the female experience, utilising sculpture, video installations and performance to provoke public introspection. Within her practice Huang, explores themes of coexistence, identity, and gender, infused with elements of violence and bodily exploitation. Throughout the visual language of her practice, Huang encapsulates these thematic explorations with elements such as ‘moving bodies’ and ‘fragile sculptures’, to challenge traditional notions of bodily autonomy and invoke a sense of an unnerving transient stability. By engaging with hidden interpersonal dynamics and eliciting empathetic responses in her installations, she seeks to provoke contemplation on broader socio-political issues through linking commanding aesthetic motifs with trauma communication.

One of the central works within the exhibition Sheng is an installation consisting of a series of wall mounted foetus eggs envisioned as a representation of a futuristic human ovum shop. The installation engages in a critique of the increasing commodification of the female ovarian egg, using red hues and embryos to communicate the natural life forms, alongside sharp metallic shapes evoking in-vitro egg retrieval instruments. Furthermore, the presentation of the sculptural eggs, encased in individual plastic sealed packaging and mounted in a row at eye level, simulates a retail environment and the fertilised foetuses as commercial products.

Sheng thus encourages us to consider the implications of the normalisation of the procurement of human reproductive materials. Their display here in slightly beaten packaging further suggests a future normalisation of these practices where the commodification has progressed to an extent of common purchase in the convenience store. In this regard, the work speaks to a dystopian scenario where society has commodified personal and biological aspects of the female body that has reduced the mother to a vessel or of material to be mined and exploited within a capitalist system. The work invites us to explore the ethical boundaries of fertility optimisation biotechnology and its contribution to or adversarial compatibility with female liberation alongside altering our perspectives on the value and sanctity of life itself.