Cell Project Space

 

Fortunate is a major solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Ruoru Mou, presenting a large-scale installation environment. For her most ambitious project to date, the artist reappropriates industrial forms, cinematic tropes, bureaucratic residue and manufacturing waste to address the material politics of luxury fashion, circulation, the optics of value, and regulatory subjectivity. 

 

Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Mou’s current research draws on two industries that informed her upbringing in Tuscany: Chinese restaurants, including one opened by her family, and Chinese-owned leather goods suppliers producing for luxury brands, a major source of local employment in the region.

 

Central to the exhibition, kinetic sculpture Dirty Snow transforms the back gallery into an enclosed chamber. In the cooler room, accessible only to the eye, automated industrial fans propel a blizzard of shredded detritus that includes: carnival confetti, residence permits, visas, sanitary certificates, risk assessments, medical booklets assessing fitness for industrial labour and maintenance logs, debt collecting receipts, among other paperwork required to access care, income and legal personhood in Italy, the UK or the Netherlands. These fragments circulate as bureaucratic weather, mixing hierarchies of industrial residue, administrative remnants and sci-fi tropes. Collecting Fees Document (wash label) lists the snowstorm’s composition in percentages, mimicking garment tags that signal ‘purity’, even down to arbitrary micro-quantities — 0.0000001% soy, 0.001% chromium leather dust. As with ‘authentic’ tags, the breakdown is a fantasy, reflecting contradictions of subjective judgment in how labour, authenticity, value and life itself are classified.

 

Among the debris, titled Prosperity, Protection, Purity, a trio of maneki neko (known as ‘Welcoming money cats’ in China) paws seem to fight through the storm in monotonous movement, waving in greeting or in farewell. Trapped in their own circuit, they address viewers who cannot step inside, while themselves unable to step out of their fortunate enclosure. Their gesture carries persistence and kinship, yet also the demand for sustenance placed upon bodies within extractive systems. Who must remain outside, and who is fortunate enough to be caught within?

 

In the front gallery, vitrine works Tease 001, Tease 002 and Tease 003 reference both luxury retail displays and Chinese restaurant decorative motifs, reusing the ornaments the artist’s grandfather crafted when her family first opened the restaurant in Italy. Steel cutting moulds for leather bags encase an organic, marble-like material composed of gelatine, glycerine, restaurant grease and soy sauce – ‘skins’ derived from Mou’s earlier work Hung Out to Dry, Holding the Bag (2025–). Pressed into the moulds, the skins push against them, shrinking and sweating over time, caught between preservation and decay. In Tease, ornament is an excess frustrating the neutrality of utility, doubling as a device of seduction, dressed in a fantasy of terror and beauty all at once.

 

This reuse of a ‘skin’ is pivotal to Mou’s process: the works form part of her own ‘factory’, where an earlier body (of work) is reprocessed into a new one. The factory here is subject and method, an ongoing cycle of casting, pressing, shrinking, shredding, reshaping and re-valuing. In Mou’s work, methods of preservation echo the sustaining and exhausting measures required to keep bodies and materials in circulation. Throughout Fortunate, organic, bureaucratic and phantasmic skins compound into identifications, patterns and protective projections, arranging and transforming the body in ways required but not necessarily wanted.

 

Producing material and optical ambiguity, the exhibition works with the protocols and tropes that organise political and economic livelihoods, asking who holds the right to enter and exit, how much time it takes to wear a body down, and how one might preserve life. Fortunate works through the ‘impurities’ embedded within systems of production, distribution and classification, taking their contingency as its critical framework.

 

Curator Adomas Narkevičius

 

For all press and access related inquiries, please contact Annabelle Mödlinger, annabelle[at]cellprojects[dot]org.

 

With generous support from Henry Moore Foundation, Cockayne Foundation and The Elephant Trust.