2024 | MIAO XUAN LIU
FANTASIES AND FORECLOSURE
TORONTO
Oct 25 - Dec 21, 2024

Fantasies and Foreclosure explores mechanisms of desire manufacture imposed upon the social and sensing body. It is built upon strategies of affective fiction which shape relations of power and the potential of material imagination to complicate and abjure these relations. This exhibition takes as a departure point scholar Lauren Berlant’s theory of Cruel Optimism, affective practices that bind strangers to each other via triangulated relations to things that appear stable but may prove not to be, specifically, the inventions of social promise that contemporary capitalism proffers, and the increasing evidence that individuals cannot make their lives “add up to anything” within its confines.

Illustrating this is the concept of the double bind, of which desire acts as primary agent. A double bind is “a psychological predicament in which a person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made”. Informed by the ever widening reach of global capital, legacies of colonization, and the excess of choice that defines our time, the double bind is increasingly encountered in contemporary life, with the body as the site where its dramas arise: bodies over exhausting themselves in the name of abundance, bodies migrating to foreign lands, exchanging a lifetime of longing for “opportunity”.

Fantasies and Foreclosure engages directly with the legacies of figurative sculpture, from Modernism’s chief innovations of abstraction and non-monumentality, to the figurative work of such female sculptors as Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois of the 60s and 70s. This exhibition is one response to the question of the contemporary figure, multifarious flesh flitting between labouring, migrating, and consumer body all at once. Central to Fantasies and Foreclosure is a Taoist world view which problematizes the Cartesian mind-body divide, a Western construction that divorces a subject from its sensory potentials and is instrumental to the subjugation of vast populations.

Formally, this work employs materials such as Hei Mu Er, a Traditional Chinese Medicine mushroom that grows on decaying deciduous wood, found objects scavenged from the train tracks beside the artist’s studio, and mass produced AliExpress sandalwood hand fans sourced from the gift shops of Toronto’s Chinatown. Together with wax, plaster, paper, human hair, readymades, pantyhose, an oyster shell, and cement, these materials challenge the traditional materials of sculpture and construct a visual vernacular that is resourceful, abject, and intimate, reflecting the porous boundaries between ourselves and others, flesh and experience. Fantasies and Foreclosure attempts to reconcile a subject with its impulses, asking: how does a subject make sense of its dreams? And what is the form of desire interrupted, transmogrified, or made anew?

Miao Xuan Liu - Fantasies and Foreclosure