There are rarities from the River Li
Like floating lungs, their shape.
Embodying Heaven, Earth, and Man,
They suffer harm, becoming trade.
Possessing so many uses,
How can they possibly escape?
-“Pearl-Turtles” Guo Pu, 276-324 AD
In Lieu is pleased to present the blues, an exhibition of large-scale felt and copper works by Pauline Shaw. This mark’s the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. In recent years, Shaw has explored the fallibility of memory and the fragility of the body through the lens of her familial history and a childhood spent between Asia and the US. For this exhibition, Shaw expands from the private--the focus of her earlier bodies of work--to the public; looking outwards she explores the interplay between colonial legacies, disease, and Eastern mythology.
The Atlantic Horseshoe Crab becomes the symbolic foundation for Shaw. The brilliant blue blood of the horseshoe crab is prized for its clotting properties, and since the 1970s, it remains the only FDA approved method of testing pharmaceuticals for bacterial toxins. The crabs, living fossils whose existence dates back 450 million years, cannot be bred in captivity and as a result, several species have been hunted to near extinction. For Shaw, the plight of Pu’s mythological Pearl-Turtle echoes the impending fate of the horseshoe crab.
Shaw also draws connections between the global trade and exploitation of the horseshoe crab with the history and ongoing colonial legacies of the Opium Wars. By the early 19th Century, British demand was insatiable for Chinese exports like tea, silk and pottery. The Chinese had little interest in British exports, and thus the British soon found themselves facing a massive trade imbalance - having no choice but to pay for all Chinese goods with silver. To solve this problem, British merchants and aristocrats began illegally importing opium into China with a view to causing mass-addiction and replenishing the massive silver deficits.
In each of her pieces, Shaw skillfully coaxes her materials to mimic the qualities of these twisting skeins of history and mythology. Raw copper, washed in ammonia and salt, slowly bleeds blue tones into white wool and echoes the iconic patterns of Qing dynasty pottery or the symptoms of argyria (a condition in which skin turns blue from an excess of silver, also the origins of the term ‘blue bloods’). A five-fingered dragon’s claw, long a symbol of the Chinese emperor, representing wealth and heavenly longevity, is presented severed and embossed into silver like a trophy. Finally, the circulatory system of a horseshoe crab, rendered in the copper that tints their blood a mythic blue, hangs as a reminder of the high cost and consequences of commercial appetites.