Award-winning artist is ‘Mumbling Mud’

PLEASE remember not to wear a pair of highheels when checking out Katharina Grosse’s exhibition “Mumbling Mud” at the chi K11 art museum. The ground is not smooth and some of the site is wrapped in cloth.

Through an immersive and labyrinthinelike passage, you first encounter a chaotic display made from piles of soil and an array of various inert building materials, covered by swathes of colorful paint.

Grosse’s “Underground” tries to immerse viewers into a site-specific show that holds up a mirror to the rapidly changing Chinese urban-scape that is made up of the same materials.

In 1998, the artist, then 37, introduced a spray gun as her primary painting tool. She believed that “a painting can land anywhere: on an egg, in the crook of the arm, in the garden, along a train platform, in snow and ice or on the beach.”

With color, the German artist traverses the established borders between objects and architectural settings, and ultimately offers models for imagining reality in ways previously unconcealed by semiotic conventions, hierarchies and social rules.

Of the five zones displayed in the basement ground, the highlight goes to the “Stomach” where hundreds of meters of coarse fabric — curving and unfolding, often with heavy knots to the ceiling and covered in multicolored paints — launches a massive attack on the viewer’s perceptual sensitivity.

Confronted with an unavoidable but highlychallenging experience of nothing but colors, one is more likely to get lost and confused than be appreciative. The highly saturated colors deepen the folds, which slowly unfurl as one meanders through the half-enclosed space.

According to the artist, “the effect resembles the digestive process — the gastric rugae smooth out to accommodate food, assimilating the edible objects as the ‘other’ from an external source.”

Date: Through February 24, 10am-8pm Venue: chi K11 art museum

Address: B3, 300 Huaihai Road M.