THE BODY OF NON-BODY

Maggie Menghan Chen, Hankang Huang, Chansong Kim, Mahesh Singh

2022.11.8 - 2023.2.12

BROWNIE Project is pleased to present the works of Maggie Menghan Chen, Hankang Huang, Chansong Kim and Mahesh Singh during Shanghai’s art month. In their paintings and sculptures, the body often presents itself as a tool to attain transcendence, namely, turning into a metaphor for the separation between the flesh and sub- stance, an intermediary between mind and nature, a response to history through digital creation, and a political allegory. These body-based expressions liberate the body from its original physical properties, blurring and extending it into the agency of psychosocial research and emotion, ultimately pointing to the possibility of a ‘’non-body’’. The four chapters are interspersed in the gallery space, embarking on an ongoing and introverted journey between bodily instinct (libido flow) and bodily essence (death drive).

The non-body nature in this exhibition is derived from the concept of non-place (non-lieux) coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé, referring to the spaces of transience that are not relational, not historical and not concerned with identity. The body, as a spatial unit that houses organs and functions, is physically natural, ex- clusive and independent of the external world, an organism closely related to the current state. In contrast, the non-body is fluid and processive, connecting its subject’s present and past while coexisting and interacting with the body as a modality. The non-body is the extension of the spiritual will. It is different from the clear-shaped existence of the body with stable volume. It has the power to hide inward and deep yet acts to connect time and space. The non-body appears in the artist’s works in the form of the body and its metaphor, e.g. bones and flesh (Chansong Kim), animal head (Maggie Menghan Chen), human-body-resembled mountain range (Mahesh Singh), the webs that bind and communicate many bodies (Hankang Huang). All of them allude to their essential dispel and propose to imagine: How to approach rebirth with spiritual freedom when the body is ever-decaying?