Over the past fifteen years, Nabuqi has probed what is taken for granted as real through direct or circuitous methods, examining the fluctuating psychological states that emerge through human interactions with matter. From hand-formed sculptures in the early 2010s to readymade-driven installations, and extending to recent works shaped as furniture or toys, Nabuqi’s artistic practice consistently draws viewers to examine physical details and psychological states, reassessing the complex relation between fiction and reality. The sculptural field she constructs underscores our perception of the surrounding world and emphasizes a dynamic oscillation across sculpture, space, theatre, literature, and sound—revealing the ways in which monumentality is disrupted by movement.

Shown at the 58th Venice Biennale, Do Real Things Happen in Moments of Rationality?  (2018) comprises diverse components, including a green “grass” carpet, a black-and-white spotted cow sculpture advancing along a track, and a fictional sky backdrop made of cascading fabrics. The installation acknowledges the ready-made state of its parts while presenting a continuous experience of sculpture interfering with and reshaping itself through wandering, absurd motion. The slowly moving cow train introduces a strange theatricality, clearly demarcating the relation between time and space while continually coalescing an object-consciousness in the process of self-dissolution. Also featured in Venice, Destination (2018) offers a similarly paradoxical experience: a massive, tilted billboard displaying an idyllic beach advertisement complete with blue skies and white sands. A plastic fern pierces through the billboard, merging with the background through shared imagery while simultaneously shattering the scene by disrupting the viewing angle. Closer inspection reveals that this protruding fern belongs to a larger cluster hidden behind the billboard—acting like a backstage crew in a visual theater, with one member breaking through the public barrier. While lasting connections exist among the elements, the resulting whole remains distinctly absurd, marking a divergence between reality and the “real.” The work exemplifies Nabuqi’s uninhibited exploration of natural and artificial objects, pointing to her integration of heterogeneous materials into installation structures and creative dialogues.

Entering the 2020s, Nabuqi developed a sculptural form linked to critical play. Her figurative and geometric forms prompt viewers to confront their physical relationship with material, heightening the tactile urgency between the work and the viewer’s hands or body. In her 2022 solo exhibition Everything goes back to square one at Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum, Nabuqi debuted installation and sculptural works centered on toys, focusing on self-discovery within one’s relationship to the world. These “toys”—varying from oversized to minute—invert the power dynamic between subject and object: viewers appear to assemble colorful, cold-textured, accessible puzzles, but this tactile engagement quickly reveals a more complex reality where the toy itself dictates the rules of engagement. Under their influence, the physical environment destabilizes, transforming viewers into cautious participants who step lightly or navigate through a labyrinth of enveloping or scattered objects.

Her 2024 exhibition Geopoetics regarding a waterless sea at Kiang Malingue Hong Kong highlighted another central thread of her practice: the intertextual relationship between sculpture and literature. Since her early career, Nabuqi’s work has frequently engaged Chinese and European literary traditions—ranging from Walter Scott’s The Black Dwarf to Lu Xun’s Autumn Night. Developed from Chen Si’an’s eponymous novella, Geopoetics regarding a waterless sea further explores geographic transformation, time and memory, spirit and faith, the division between land and sea, and the tension between literature and sculpture. Four works from the “Fish finding a path ashore” (2024) series extend the light sculpture format she has expanded since the 2017 Cold Nights exhibition, covering two-meter-tall sculptural structures with readymade imagery. The artist prints images onto archival photo paper, crumples them, and repeatedly coats the surface with clear resin to yield a withered yet plump, strange deep-sea morphology. Another sculpture, Geo-cataloguer (2024), partially continues the “game table” motif long favored by the artist, utilizing clay modeling and solid casting to produce a light aluminum blueprint measuring just 3–5 mm thick—a work Nabuqi describes as “fragile yet stratified, blended into a single pile, impossible to separate.”

Nabuqi graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2013. Nabuqi’s work has been widely exhibited in major international exhibitions including: “XSWL”, White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, 2024; “China, A New Generation of Artists”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2024; “Geopoetics regarding a waterless sea”, Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong, 2024; “Nabuqi: ‘A Question is Also a Form of Sculpture’”, M WOODS 798, Beijing, 2024; “Everything goes back to square one”, West Bund Museum, Shanghai, 2022; “Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity”, Asia Society Museum, New York, 2022; “Feeling the Stones: The First Diriyah Biennial”, 2021; “Noire Lumière”, HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, 2020; “Study of Things. Or A Brief Story about Fountain, Brick, Tin, Coin, Wax, Stone, Shell, Curtain and Body”, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangdong, 2020; 58th Venice Biennale “May You Live In Interesting Times”, 2019; “Cold Nights”, UCCA Art Centre, Beijing, 2017; “Absent Paragraph”, Museum Beelden aan Zee, Den Haag, 2017; “Any Ball”, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, 2017; the 11th Shanghai Biennale “Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories”, 2016, and the 11th Gwangju Biennale “The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?)”, 2016. She was nominated for the 2016 Art Sanya Huayu Youth Award.