WAX FIGURES
Artist Ren Ri’s beeswax sculptures sit at the intersection of biology and technology, nature and artifice, animal and apparatus. For this series the Chinese artist constructed clear acrylic boxes, large enough to hold bowling balls, and filled them with swarms of bees. Every so often, as the hives were growing, he rotated the boxes and repositioned the queens. Afterwards he flushed the insects and honey from the cages, leaving the empty rippled, folded beeswax forms inside. These look, from up close, like abandoned post-nuclear landscapes and, from across the room, look like the desicated organs of a prehistoric beast.
There’s a strange tension between the tidy hexagonal structure of the hives and their bulging, swollen contours. The cells gives these works a pixellated look, as if they’ve been modeled with a computer program. They don’t seem to recognize gravity, as the beeswax congeals equivalently to all interior faces of the cube. And they don’t seem to recognize Cartesian geometry, their soft, tissue-like clumps evoking a shambolic, bodily logic. Though they offer rich compositions, the wax formations don’t lend themselves to contemplation. Stuffed within the antiseptic plastic boxes, they’re charged with physical potential, as if they’re about to come to life, to change, to grown.
