No! #2, 2025

Gang Chen  

The winner of the 1st prize in sculpture section at the London and Florence Biennale. This is #2 of the series of 3 pieces. It is advised to buy as a set of three pieces. The world in which I exist—or rather, this so-called real society—has always been in a kind of natural opposition to my inner world. A constant sense of dissonance runs through my life. I am trying to slowly adapt to both dimensions; yet in this process, the force that clashes with reality manifests itself as something violent and weighty. It is both a force and a consequence: it does not alter the external world, but instead transforms me from within.

The “NO!" series, presented in this exhibition, offers a silent yet powerful visual response to the theme of the conflict between the individual and reality. The forms, extremely compressed and distorted, embody the tension of such opposition. Smooth and rounded on the surface, they nevertheless reveal folds and depressions produced by internal pressure: facial muscles, swollen and contracted, seem to collapse inward, generating new flowing lines at the points of compression; remaining fragments of human anatomy, such as ears, are bent, squeezed, and nearly dissolved into the overall mass. This self-devouring formal language transforms sculpture from a static entity into a moment of confrontation—becoming a visible trace of both the external forces imposed upon it and the inner counter-reaction of the subject.