![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/2026_Flesh-in-Stone-Anthropos-VI_JI-007_view-02-1230x1845.jpg\")
Flesh in Stone \u2013 Anthropos VI, 2026, concrete, plaster, wood, 176 \u00d7 80 \u00d7 56 cm. Photo: Ian Edquist. \u00a9 the artist. Courtesy the artist and PPOW, New York<\/p>\nWhat does Yu Ji\u2019s latest exhibition, produced across the artist\u2019s residency offering art education to children, actually have to say? <\/p>\n
Yu Ji\u2019s solo exhibition brings together a suite of sculptures made following a residency the artist set up in Phnom Penh that offered art education to children. Objects referencing motherhood, play and collective gathering fill the first room: reed mats lie on the gallery floor littered with snail shells and books like a scene from kindergarten, while across the room a small Sony Trinitron loops low-res footage of a clothes hanger blowing with the wind (PKA \u2013 Is this not a meeting, all works 2026); collaged drawings in handmade frames layer pencil and charcoal studies of Edith Piaf\u2019s portrait by Cambodian children and Yu\u2019s own child over an obfuscated domestic scene (Untitled 240410). The show is charmingly nimble in its evocation of everyday kinetic materials. It also harbours nostalgia for the romantic notion of living on the periphery with abundant references to the artist\u2019s alliance with the local children of Phnom Penh.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Its title derives from a Khmer folktale in which a ruler and six members of his royal entourage survive a dangerous journey between kingdoms by transforming themselves into a single tiger. Like the tiger from the fable, most of Yu\u2019s works here are composites. The Play Know Attention sculptures are cherry wood chairs of various sizes, customised and ornamented with ghostly concrete casts or moulds of sitters\u2019 knees. The chairs come in small, medium and large, as if they are meant to be outgrown and replaced. The collage Untitled 240225 pairs a silkscreen print of a Cambodian teenager learning craft during a workshop with baked goods hanging provisionally from the handmade frame. Origin of the Tiger \u2013 CRUS, a wooden structure containing a giant reed-mat sleeve whose form resembles a coffee filter, is held aloft by cables and borne from below by five plaster casts of children\u2019s legs \u2013 white, spectral, truncated at the thigh. PKA \u2013 lullaby, a wall-mounted wooden mobile with dangling handmade hangers, carries a note describing the accidental, eruptive intensity of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. Soft audio of children reciting \u2018Origin of the Tiger\u2019 in Khmer plays from the music box on the mobile into the gallery, one of the few incidents in the exhibition where the children enter as collaborators rather than muses \u2013 or figures of the kind of sociality contemporary artists are often expected to facilitate. In the rear gallery, Flesh in Stone \u2013 Anthropos VI stands headless on a pallet of Cambodian hardwood, its white plaster torso sutured unevenly onto grey concrete legs. According to exhibition materials, the figure was inspired by a sixth-century Krishna at the National Museum of Cambodia whose limbs were long misattributed to an unrelated work at the Cleveland Museum of Art: a colonial dispersal that mirrors the exhibition\u2019s own centrifugal logic. Its brittle flesh here is unheroic and mundane, overextended by existential weight.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Flesh in Stone \u2013 Anthropos VI, 2026, concrete, plaster, wood, 176 \u00d7 80 \u00d7 56 cm. Photo: Ian Edquist. \u00a9 the artist. Courtesy the artist and PPOW, New York<\/p>\n
The most radical claim here is epistemological: that the exhibition, according to the press release, derives some \u2018communal and social\u2019 energy from Yu\u2019s Phnom Penh workshops. Even if we suppose that working with children constitutes genuine co-investigation, that children are interlocutors rather than subjects, that democratic play is knowledge production irreducible to its documentation, this is a claim that the exhibition, whose works are solely attributed to Yu, ultimately avoids delivering on. What was anarchic about learning alongside children as equals \u2013 the abdication of mastery, the surrender to an intelligence not yet calcified into expertise \u2013 is left to conjecture in Origin of the Tiger, a show that is more persuasive as a map of interpretive inequality, one that attunes us to who is granted passage, what survives transit and what the whimsy of an installation of residues forecloses.<\/p>\n
Yu Ji: Origin of the Tiger was at PPOW, New York, 6 March \u2013 11 April<\/a><\/p>\n From the April & May 2026 issue of\u00a0ArtReview\u00a0\u2013\u00a0get your copy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Qingyuan Deng<\/a>Reviews<\/a>May 22, 2026ArtReview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What does Yu Ji\u2019s latest exhibition, produced across the artist\u2019s residency offering art education to children, actually have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-440051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}