Inga Thorsdottir & Wu Shanzhuan

AlsoDoMinie, Singapore, 2014, 91 pp.

“The evening Wu and I first met, we talked together about art, and the language we used was English with drawings. I told Wu that I had that summer seen a Duchamp show in Paris, that I really loved his work, and had gotten the idea to dialogue with his ready-mades, by simply bringing them back into use…”

Conceptualist duo Inga Svala Thorsdottir (Iceland) and Wu Shanzhuan (China) have been working collaboratively since they met in 1991, starting with a photo work titled ‘An Appreciation’, where Wu urinated into a replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain to restore the urinal back to its original purpose. This later led to the establishment of the ‘Thing’s Right(s)’ constitution in 1994.

“The Printer. The Paper. The Layer. The Thing’s Right(s). The Little Fat Flesh.” presents the artists’ evolving humanist ideology on print and paper. Theirs is a peculiar language built upon years of formulating conceptual tools that challenge accustomed beliefs and our relationship with the environment.

Wu Shanzhuan is one of the leading figures of the 1980s pre-Tiananmen Square generation of Chinese Conceptualists, and Inga Svala Thorsdottir started Thor’s Daughter’s Pulverization Service in 1993 reducing all things back to its powder form, and is the founder of BORG (1999). They live and work in Hamburg, Shanghai and Reykjavík.

Essay by Lau Kin Wah.