The solo exhibition of Wiebke Siem brings together nearly one hundred works across such mediums as sculpture, installation, and paper, spanning various phases of the artist’s multi-decade career.

‍

With sculpture at the core of her practice, Wiebke Siem extracts everyday objects from their original contexts while warping their form and meaning. Since the 1980s, she has been using fashion as a point of entry, transforming clothing into unwearable sculptures. Hand-sewn dresses, coats, and hats hang suspended without wearers, becoming the outer garments of cultural gender constructs. She has also been reconstructing traditional 18th and 19th century furniture from the German countryside, painstakingly restoring their structure and details while intentionally diminishing their practical function, stripping them from reality to become fixed cultural heirlooms imbued with the collective memory of modern Germany’s national narrative.

‍

Siem’s focus is not limited to objects themselves but is directed at the symbiotic relationships between objects and people. In her meticulously-designed home scenes, life has been quietly dismantled and reconstituted, with objects and bodies permeating each other. The furniture grows limbs, while the kitchen implements and home spaces are silent and static as a stage backdrop, implying regimented rehearsal. The “figures” within are silent, unbalanced, dislocated, but lifelike, awakening the viewer’s alertness and isolation from once familiar surroundings, thus transforming everyday life into a field revealing the structures of power. In this way, the artist emphasizes that the body is a tool shaped by cultural systems, revealing the reality that everyday labors and gender divisions have long been shaped and maintained by social order.

‍

This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, in collaboration with Assistant Curator Gao Liangjiao, and Exhibition Coordinator Zhao Da.