Pleased to share Yu Ji’s Flesh in Stone – Components #6 (2025), currently on view in the Botanical Garden of KU Leuven.

Yu Ji works with the human body. Her sculptural work focuses on the way bodies can be shaped, not based on reality but on subjective memory. Her works usually take the form of cement sculptures of bodies with severed limbs, like prehistoric figurines that have been disfigured through the ages.

The theme Makeable Human draws on the fact that contemporary medicine is mainly motivated by the promise of a malleable human body: the idea that all kinds of disabilities, diseases and dysfunctions can be cured. This raises ethical questions about the limits and risks of undesirable and unachievable forms of perfection. In reaction to this theme, Yu Ji has considered the difference between a cloned body in medicine and a body in sculpture. As an alternative to cloning, she decided not to copy a body that really exists, but to compose a new body from parts of different bodies. The lower body is based on her six-year-old son onto which she placed the chest of an adult man. There is a major dysfunction, however: there is a left shoulder on the right and a right shoulder on the left. There are no arms and no head, and the body is reduced to the core. Where the head should be, the artist has made the body even more grotesque by adding a body part that seems to be a piece of shoulder with two child’s knees. Yu Ji says of her work: “The body is broken. If the incompleteness originates in the flesh, the flesh will find its own solution, and this incompleteness will come to life.”

The work is initially exhibited in the Botanical Garden, which was originally created to grow medicinal plants. Later, it will be given a permanent place beside the old anatomical lecture theatre opposite the Botanical Garden.

— Courtesy of KU Leuven.