Nicole Zhao watched old-school confectioners stretch maltose syrup into candy during her time growing up in Nanchang, China. She gives me an iconically packaged White Rabbit sweet, which starts as a solid rock, warming up to become supple and chewy in the mouth. Zhao is both a chef and a scientist, balancing her ingredients with the conditions of their installation to create creatures that live and change with as much vitality as we do.
Residing in Form Gallery as part of the exhibition Meanwhile (alongside works by Varun Garg and Liam Cowie), her candy works glisten with a subtle dewiness. The maltose and corn-starch concoctions are placed inside various stockings as well as melting atop a stool and drooling over a wooden post—both enticing and repulsive. The finest stocking sprouts subtle whiteheads, beading up where the candy pokes through. Another, wetter, mixture trails to the ground like icing spilling out of a piping bag, adorning the floor with delicate swirls. Their sweet secretions are at once food and flesh.
Zhao curates her dichotomies. A big slab of maltose trails through a hole in the middle of Stool Test’s seat, pooling down to the ground like excrement—paralleling the pun of Joseph Beuys’ Fat Chair, where the German word for chair, ‘stuhl’, is of course pronounced as stool (faeces). The stool’s hole, she reminds me, is specifically designed as a hold for your finger when you’re stacking the seats.
Enamoured by the materials’ volition, the viewer can’t help but slow down, breathe deeply and sigh with the work. We meet in a state of ageing. Like meeting an old friend for the first time in a while, both parties appear completely the same yet have changed an unknowable amount between encounters. Both the work’s flesh and ours are constantly in flux yet enduringly resilient.
