Yu Ji’s solo exhibition brings together a suite of sculptures made following a residency the artist set up in Phnom Penh that offered art education to children. Objects referencing motherhood, play and collective gathering fill the first room: reed mats lie on the gallery floor littered with snail shells and books like a scene from kindergarten, while across the room a small Sony Trinitron loops low-res footage of a clothes hanger blowing with the wind (PKA – Is this not a meeting, all works 2026); collaged drawings in handmade frames layer pencil and charcoal studies of Edith Piaf’s portrait by Cambodian children and Yu’s own child over an obfuscated domestic scene (Untitled 240410). The show is charmingly nimble in its evocation of everyday kinetic materials. It also harbours nostalgia for the romantic notion of living on the periphery with abundant references to the artist’s alliance with the local children of Phnom Penh.
Its title derives from a Khmer folktale in which a ruler and six members of his royal entourage survive a dangerous journey between kingdoms by transforming themselves into a single tiger. Like the tiger from the fable, most of Yu’s works here are composites. The Play Know Attention sculptures are cherry wood chairs of various sizes, customised and ornamented with. ghostly concrete casts or moulds of sitters’ knees. The chairs come in small, medium and large, as if they are meant to be outgrown and replaced. The collage Untitled 240225 pairs a silkscreen print of a Cambodian teenager learning craft during a workshop with baked goods hanging provisionally from the handmade frame. Origin of the Tiger – CRUS, a wooden structure containing a giant reed-mat sleeve whose form resembles a coffee filter, is held aloft by cables and borne from below by five plaster casts of children’s legs – white, spectral, truncated at the thigh. PKA – lullaby, a wall-mounted wooden mobile with dangling handmade hangers, carries a note describing the accidental, eruptive intensity of déjà vu. Soft audio of children reciting ‘Origin of the Tiger’ in Khmer plays from the music box on the mobile into the gallery, one of the few incidents in the exhibition where the children enter as collaborators rather than muses – or figures of the kind of sociality contemporary artists are often expected to facilitate. In the rear gallery, Flesh in Stone – Anthropos VI stands headless on a pallet of Cambodian hardwood, its white plaster torso sutured unevenly onto grey concrete legs. According to exhibition materials, the figure was inspired by a sixth-century Krishna at the National Museum of Cambodia whose limbs were long misattributed to an unrelated work at the Cleveland Museum of Art: a colonial dispersal that mirrors the exhibition’s own centrifugal logic. Its brittle flesh here is unheroic and mundane, overextended by existential weight.
The most radical claim here is epistemological: that the exhibition, according to the press release, derives some ‘communal and social’ energy from Yu’s Phnom Penh workshops. Even if we suppose that working with children constitutes genuine co-investigation, that children are interlocutors rather than subjects, that democratic play is knowledge production irreducible to its documentation, this is a claim that the exhibition, whose works are solely attributed to Yu, ultimately avoids delivering on. What was anarchic about learning alongside children as equals – the abdication of mastery, the surrender to an intelligence not yet calcified into expertise – is left to conjecture in Origin of the Tiger, a show that is more persuasive as a map of interpretive inequality, one that attunes us to who is granted passage, what survives transit and what the whimsy of an installation of residues forecloses.