Sculpture Series: Kuiper Samples

Meteorite-resistant appearance, encasing starfish fossils.

He rolls the glossy, black pearl-like clay into thin strips, breaks them apart, and molds them into pea-sized black balls. His arms grow tired, and his fingertips work like a wound-up machine, pressing one black ball after another onto a wooden board, as if he is creating a dark, swirling galaxy.

This is a repetitive process over a large area. The black serves as a dial, and the white represents the ticking of time. However, something abruptly and shockingly stops this process. He decisively brushes a white gel-like substance over the black holes of this galaxy, with the white once again dominating the black. The current result is both heartbreaking and mesmerizing.

Layer by layer, he adds different materials: shell powder, soil, mineral powder, cowhide glue, deerskin glue, and rabbit skin glue.

Each layer's presence obliterates the previous one. Night falls, and he begins to polish...

Kneading and constructing the sculpture's prototype

Polishing to achieve a luster and shape reminiscent of the moon's surface.

Like a "theater of memory," during the process of friction, elimination, and destruction, the dust and mist generated by polishing evoke memories. The color of the previous layer is the texture of this moment's skin, representing a virus, a seed, or a mold spot. They occasionally appear, growing in places that rapid explanations cannot reach.

Thus, the past and present connect in an ambiguously fluctuating manner.

The state of the studio and unfinished works

In most of Meng's works, you can see dancing human figures. They have no facial features, resembling the branching of brain fibers in dreams, the pulsating waves of heart vessels, and the exploratory tentacles of jellyfish or starfish.

The figures in the paintings lose their substance, becoming semi-transparent, defying Earth's gravity, existing yet untouchable. Like children without mothers, their origins are unspoken. They seem to exist in a "liminal state," "hovering between life and death," lonely at the "threshold between dreams and reality, past and present."

Their dancing forms, moving fluidly and symbolically, resist the domination of the carnal world through blurred dreamscapes, deviating from the utilitarian demands of a consumerist age. They strip away the specific narratives of the flesh, as the starry sky inverts and souls lift from the ground.

This reflects what Gabriel Marcel calls "crispation"—a tense, shell-covered form of life. "It is as if each of us secretes a shell that slowly hardens and imprisons us." Meng's works represent a flawed resistance against this hardening.

In the vast expanse of cosmic time, the physical body will eventually become transparent. I am you, and you are me. Although we may not share the same bloom period, we could all be that silent fossil on the seabed. From organic to inorganic, dancing is the code of memory, the trace on a fossil, a crack in a compacted world.

「Sustained Utilisation」

61h x 46w cm

In 2022, Meng and his Bedouin guide reached the remote area of the "White Desert" deep in the Sahara of Egypt. As far as the eye could see, there were bizarre, solitary white rock formations, like a scattering of giant white mushrooms from a dream. The silence was absolute, as if all living beings had been sealed within these hard, white structures. However, when he crouched down under the starry sky of the Sahara and looked closely, signs of life were everywhere. In that moment, he picked up and held in his palm sea urchin fossils and various shells.

 Purchasing materials at the pearl market

Most of his travels and even his purchases in the studio are related to these "objects" named after various nouns. These include Timor Sea fossils, Chinese black snail fossils, dragon bone starfish, petrified wood, Han dynasty bronze pieces, iron meteorites, starfish fossils, pearls, Roman bronze arrowheads, ancient Greek glass beads, and marble marbles. In his works, these silent nouns are like recordings, and he is the sound engineer.

Through the experience of collecting and gathering these "objects," his curiosity and inquiry bring these fragmented items to life again in the chaotic space of his nonlinear narrative creation. You bloom at one moment, I wither at another. Although this placement creation is occasional, it conceals his discussions on various topics. The embedded presence of "objects" from different times, spaces, geographies, and civilizations bears witness to the rise and fall of the human community. In the overlapping and interpretation of the drifting past, present, and future, a visual "archaeological image of time" is formed.

At this moment, these "objects" are grand and resonate profoundly.

Collection of unfinished pieces in the studio

At four in the afternoon, Meng arrived at the Paris Botanical Garden from London. He walked along the shaded path beside the giant glass greenhouse with his friend who studies ferns. The sunlight was just right. He stopped in front of a plant, having just returned to Europe from a residency on a remote island in Panama. They talked about the plant suddenly illuminated by the sun. Some of its leaves had very regular cracks. He explained that this was the work of Panama leaf-cutting ants. When the leaves were young and still curled up, they were nibbled by the larvae of the leaf-cutting ants. As the leaves grew and unfolded, they turned into a series of small holes, forming a regular geometric pattern.

In his works, this kind of wandering presence or absence of species is omnipresent, either hidden or highlighted. This integration, mixture, and chaos, expressed in an indistinct state that is difficult to discuss, forms his expression of the void.

Madagascar rattan, plastic, Guatemalan Mayan ceramic figurines