TIAN JIANXIN

How to use a rice cooker inner pot? First, place it on a workstation at a suitable height. Next, hammer it into a form of your liking. Finally, hang it on a wall where you see fit. The exhibition unfolds as Tian’s tongue-in-cheek manual for useless things.

The presentation brings together a group of sculptures by the artist in recent years. He salvages discarded domestic and industrial objects—rice cooker inner pots, former Soviet gasoline barrels, car hoods, herbal medicine scoops, mugs, dustpans, safety helmets, and more. His techniques are strikingly simple while the working process is intensely physical. Through hammering, collaging, and occasional localized coloration, faint bas-reliefs of faces and bodies begin to emerge across metal surfaces. He never subjects found objects to destructive interventions such as cutting; rather, he allows forms to be freed from the objects themselves, conceiving and shaping new figures from their existing forms, textures, and traces of use. In Hercules (2024), the helmet’s rivets animate the figure’s wide-eyed, glaring expression, while the raised ridges of its shell transform into defined brow bones and bulged veins. In Second Skin (2025), gauze-like copper mesh protrudes from fractures in an aluminum tray, highlighting exposed wounds on an otherwise idealized, muscular torso. Tian’s practice is a constant tango with limitation: the artist works within the framework of the given object—not as something to be constrained by, but as a source of guidance and inspiration.

The trick to this tango lies in a pure, and consequently fresh, way of looking. The artist temporarily banishes preconceived notions of an object’s function, origin, and value, approaching what stands before him with an almost ignorant curiosity. In the same way that Michelangelo saw the angel in the marble, Tian uncovers latent possibilities embedded within mundane objects.

The works reflects a broad spectrum of influences from the histories of art and sculpture. His largest work to date, Narcissus (2026), invokes the Greek mythology of the young man who falls blindly in love with his own reflection, probing themes of self and image, desire and projection. Lotus Position (2026) similarly embodies a folkloric sense of surrealism. Many of Tian’s works, such as Hand (2025) and Half the Sky (2026), eschew the complete figure or grand scenes in favor of a gesture, a fragment of a torso, or a glimpse of a visage, recalling Auguste Rodin’s sustained fascination with the partial body. At times, the figures assume the rounded fullness of Tang dynasty Buddhist statuary; at others, they evoke the rustic rawness and endearing naïveté of folk effigies such as festival masks and architectural guardian beasts.

Through these shifting references, the works guide viewers across a procession of temporalities and civilizations. At the same time, the exhibition as a whole forms an uncanny yet whimsical post-industrial ruin, quietly registering the residues of what we produce, consume, create, and think. The title A User Guide is a playful nod to the artist’s method of reactivating discarded objects. Moving through the exhibition, viewers may begin to uncover the hidden value and poetics of ordinary things. Ultimately, the exhibition serves as a manual for alternative ways of seeing, imagining, and interpreting the world.