Soft Monuments
Soft Monuments
exhibition dates:
exhibition dates:
July 10-16, 2023
July 10-16, 2023
artist:
artist:
Ji Chai (Han Chai)
Ji Chai (Han Chai)
curator:
curator:
Christine Guo
Christine Guo
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Soft Monuments transforms cloth and pliable textures into standing sculptural forms, shifting fabric from a functional surface into an autonomous body. Through tension, internal structure, and layering, soft materials are compelled to occupy space vertically, negotiating gravity and posture while retaining their vulnerability. The works resist the language of utility and instead propose softness as a condition of presence — one that folds memory, gesture, and care into form.
This exhibition extends the artist’s ongoing inquiry into material as a bearer of memory and “reversed craftsmanship”. The sculptures approach cloth not as disposable matter but as a medium that resists disappearance. In an economy defined by rapid production and erasure, the transformation of soft texture into monument becomes a deliberate act of preservation.
Chai’s use of materials reclaims what industrial processes have consumed, these standing textile forms reclaim softness from its expected role as passive or ornamental. They operate as quiet monuments to bodies and cultures that were never granted permanence — forms shaped by labour, repetition, and marginal visibility. The sculptures do not aim at nostalgia, but at excavation: treating pliable matter with the seriousness once reserved for stone and bronze.
By elevating fabric into sculptural presence, Soft Monuments questions who is allowed to endure materially and who is expected to vanish. The works propose a revaluation of softness as structure, and of craft as an act of care. Here, texture becomes architecture, and memory is held not in image but in weight, tension, and the slow insistence of form.
artist:
artist:
Ji Chai (Han Chai)
Ji Chai (Han Chai)
Chai’s work explores the possibility of sculptures and how people who feel lost within a capitalist system create their own forms of visibility and identity.
Material transformation is central to her process. she works with cement, textiles, bone, and bamboo, and with those materials, she creates a form that’s opposite to their usual feel and shape . This reversal gives weight to lives that were often overlooked. By placing fragile, throwaway imagery into noble materials, she reveals the tension between official histories and the lived experiences they ignore.
Many of her works adopt the structure of a museum display. The process is slow and deliberate. She carves, engraves, and assembles each piece by hand so that every object holds the care and attention that the original communities rarely received.
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