Edouard Malingue is pleased to present an exhibition of Nabuqi’s works at the gallery’s Tin Wan studio, showcasing for the first time the artist’s silkscreen prints, and a new sculpture ‘Game and the Importance of the Joints’, created in 2020.

For more than a decade, Nabuqi has been recognised for her persevering exploration of profound and uncanny sculptural and spatial forms. Signature series of works, including ‘A View Beyond Space’  (since 2015) and ‘The Doubtful Site’ (2018) in their slender or flattened gestures, directly confront the space and those within. Meticulously textured in consuming and subtle ways, the tranquil, majestic and at times humorous work triggers vertigo in the viewer, as it silently channels and ripples. The paradoxical nature of Nabuqi’s work – the tangible volume of which physically scales the observer up and down, as the embedded fictional space captures and anchors thoughts and imaginations – renders it open, relaxed and at once enclosed, steep.

Exhibited for the first time, is a number of silkscreen prints based upon Nabuqi’s small-scale drawings on paper. Since 2013, the artist has been creating with ink or acrylic small-scale drawings. A number of which has grown into large-scale sculptural or installation works; many of the drawings, however, remain as self-sufficient and independent artworks, contextualising the artist’s other series in reserved, undisclosed ways. Most recently, Nabuqi transforms some of the delicate, private drawings into silkscreen prints, revealing a number of surprising themes and hermetic contemplations and the artist’s distinct understanding of painting elements such as flatness, colour and compositional matrixes. Shown for the first time, the series responds actively to the manifestation of figurative forms and theatricality in recent works such as ‘Do real things happen in moments of rationality?’ (2018), and further affirms the central position of scale and measure in Nabuqi’s long-term practise.

Nabuqi’s ‘Game and the Importance of the Joints’ (2020) hides a miniature playground within a structure that looks likes children’s toys. In her previous works like the large-scale kinetic room installation ‘Object No.3′ (2014), the artist already clearly expresses her interest in goalless, non-competitive games. On the other hand, ‘Game and the Importance of the Joints’, in its simple, smooth and untangled configuration, marks the latest development of Nabuqi’s interest in play, and the ongoing communication between the artist’s sculptural practise and plinth-less readymade/installation practise.

Nabuqi was born 1984 in Inner Mongolia, China. She graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2013, and currently lives and works in Beijing. Her recent exhibitions include 58th Venice Biennale (Venice, 2019); Cold Nights (UCCA Art Centre, 2017); Absent Paragraph (Museum Beelden aan Zee, 2017); Any Ball (Central Academy of Fine Arts, 2017), The 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016) and the 10th Gwangju Biennale (2016). She has been nominated for the 2016 Art Sanya Huayu Youth Award.