A Blade Unheld - Act I 1 October - 16 October 2025
Ruiji Han
Derived from the artist's personal writings, the title 'A Blade Unheld' is a subtle, parable-like imagery that hovers between language and materiality. It speaks not of the absence of a blade, but rather about its suspension — a state in which sharpness is withheld and power is deferred. When the blade departs from the grasping hand, its predetermined function as a weapon is disarmed, and its capacity for harm is thereby dissolved. Therefore, a new sensibility emerges, allowing the cold metal to acquire the potential of touching softness, of revealing vulnerability.
Within the exhibition space, the industrial scars of laser-cutting and welding intertwine with organic patterns that spread like nervous or river systems, unfolding a sustained tension between the opposing concepts of order and disorder, constraint and fluidity. Han's sculpture can be seen as a re-negotiation of the spatial logic defined by Rosalind Krauss in Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1979) . Krauss argues that postmodern sculpture occupies a “negative condition” defined by its position as neither architecture nor landscape. In this sense, Han’s metallic forms are not representations of external nature, but rather a kind of internal secretion—an emergent naturality produced from within industrial systems themselves.
In Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016), Timothy Morton advocates for abandoning the romanticization of “Nature” in order to confront the strange, viscous, and non-human relationships of coexistence that constitutes ecological reality. By creating traces of corrosion and decay, Han allows industrial materials to re-enter the logic of natural entropy, exposing the ruinous ontology inherent in all industrial creation. The architectural grid that underpins modernist rationality is, in turn, eroded by these fluid, organic forms. In ‘Act i,’ these contradictory entities, which hover on the edge of the material's inherent properties and its ideology, challenge established habits of perception with their refusal to be categorized.
A Blade Unheld - Act II 17 October - 1 November 2025
Ruiji Han
As the exhibition unfolds into ‘Act ii’, the viewer's perspective expands into the depths of matter and time. If ‘Act i’ suspends the functionality of violence, then this part turns towards an archaeology of the violence and memory that have been sealed, compressed, and forgotten within the folds of time. Here, a more diffuse and immense structure of power is revealed, one that is no longer about the direct relationship between human and tool, but about the prolonged confrontation between species, geological epochs, and industrial ruins.
The Tetrapod, as a coastal engineering structure, functions to resist the erosion of ocean waves. In the context of drastic climate change, they are transformed into a hybrid entity —somewhere between fortification and fossil. The juxtaposition of concrete and fossil compresses ‘shallow time’ of industry and the ‘deep time’ of geology onto the same material plane. This contrast casts the work into a crack of time: steel signifies the age of industry and defense, while the fossil point to the deep memory of geology and life. Defence of Deep Time offers a perceptible slice through which we may briefly glimpse, at a human scale, the operations of the ‘hyperobject’ that humanity cannot grasp—that is, the entanglement stretching from the ‘deep time’ to the Anthropocene.
The Cryo Layers series, in turn, redirects our attention from the grand scale of geology to the intimate contact zones between body and object. Sealed in transparent resin, objects such as scorpions, discarded tires, and the artist’s welding gloves become what Sara Ahmed calls ‘sticky objects’. In Queer Phenomenology (2006), Ahmed discusses how emotions and histories ‘stick’ to the surfaces of objects, shaping our relationships with them. Here, the glove retains the warmth and memory of labor, the tire clings to the friction and erosion of movement, and the scorpion bears a suspended, latent threat. Through the process of solidification and sealing in resin, these dynamic objects, laden with affective imprints, are transformed into a silent archive, a ‘suspended time-slice’ that records the interplay of the body, labor, and memory.These constellations of industrial debris, animal specimens, and discarded artifacts esonate closely with Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), in which she describes multi-species survival within damaged landscapes. Tsing argues that new, unexpected ecological relations are forming upon the ruins of global capitalism. Similarly, the works here are not pristine creations, but rather forms of ‘contaminated diversity’ ruins. that have taken shape within industrial ruins. The coupling of ancient fossils with concrete, or animal bodies with mechanical fragments, both reveal a resilient, pre-material state of continuous ‘becoming’ amidst violence and decay.
Revisiting the aforementioned practice of ‘worlding’ it is not difficult to see that this methodology begins with the prospect of an alternative epistemology, or rather, a questioning of the presumed neutrality of matter. Geology, for instance, has never been neutral; it is deeply implicated in the historical narratives of colonialism and racism: Whose lives are deemed worthy of becoming fossils? And whose histories are written into the strata? The binary division between ‘life’ and ‘non-life’ is, in itself, a product of colonial modernity—an epistemic violence that stripped stones, waters, and winds of their agency and kinship within animist cosmologies.
Communicating between deep time and the present, connecting the organic with the industrial, the artist becomes a shamanic intermediary, performing a perilous act of alchemical transformation within rigid classificatory systems. This method resonates deeply with José Esteban Muñoz's strategy of ‘dis-identification’: facing mainstream culture and material order, the marginal subject neither fully embraces nor simply rejects them, but rather opens up new spaces for survival in the interstices through creative appropriation and transformation. The metal in the exhibition is endowed with the form of plants, and fossils are forcibly implanted into contemporary infrastructure. They refuse to offer a harmonious, healed vision of the future. Instead, they insist on a resilient, queer mode of survival that persists amid contradiction and ruin—an existence sustained within the suspended gesture of A Blade Unheld, ever opening toward new political and ontological possibilities.