2024
2 Fast 2 Safe
08.03. - 17.03.2024
2023
Day Scuptures
03.11. - 18.11.2023
Softpretty
07.10. - 22.10.2023
Chorusing
23.06. - 29.06.2023
PERSONA
30.03. - 04.04.2023
TIDAL
17.03. - 24.03.2023
The Dream
04.02. - 09.03.2023
2022
Voodoo for Fun & Profit
9.12. - 16.12.2022
I think they should break up
18.11. - 25.11.2022
ZDRÓJ
16.10. - 23.10.22
THREE COURSE MENU
05.07 - 10.07.22
KNIFE AND COMB
10.06. - 15.06.22
THE PERFECT SMILE: SIX TEETH SHOW
07.05. - 12.05.22
“IF I WANT TO I WILL”
18.04. - 02.05.22
2021
Self-Service
10.12. - 20.12.21
BONES
20.11. - 05.12.21
facets, faces
22.10. - 31.10.21
memory is a social organ
10.09. - 19.09.21
Ungrowing
18.06. - 03.07.21
Side Chair, Artist’s Table, #4 Oval Box
04.06. - 14.06.21
HARDCOEUR
23.04. - 30.04.21
Elements of Reading
16.04. - 18.04.21
2020
side by side
24.07. - 29.07.20
ONE AGREEMENT
09.07. - 19.07.20
FAMILIENBANDE
20.03. - 13.04.20
Smells Like Team Spirit
13.03. - 15.03.20
Don't worry, there will be more problems.
21.02. - 07.03.22
2019
tracing echoes
01.11. - 10.11.19
Museum der Kritik
24.10. - 26.10.19
Sekundenbruchteile
17.10. - 20.10.19
less skin
06.09. - 13.09.19
IN ACTU. IN POTENTIA.
17.05. - 26.05.19
Soundbathing
16.02. - 17.02.19
Rips
25.01. - 30.01.19
2018
Subject:Fwd:Unknown
18.10. - 09.12.18
Subject:Fwd:Unknown / Yutie Lee
30.11. - 09.12.18
Subject:Fwd:Unknown / Tim Etchells
16.11. - 25.11.18
Subject:Fwd:Unknown / Nora Turato
02.11. - 11.11.18
Subject:Fwd:Unknown / Michal Heiman
19.10. - 28.10.18
Gentle Heterodoxy. Social Body
and its Enchantments
30.09. - 09.10.18
Partinuscha's
24.08.18
Proud to present...
15.07. - 21.07.18
-46,08°
11.02. - 25.02.18
2017
P r e s h o w r i t u a l
28.10. - 24.11.17
SuperLiv/fe
09.10. - 10.10.17
Is the peacock merely beautiful or also honest?
01.06. - 23.06.17
THE PERFECT SMILE: SIX TEETH
SHOWN
Ming Yuan
07.05. - 12.05.2022
Photo: Theresa Büchner
The Perfect Smile: Six Teeth Shown
Smiling is a key social signal for transmitting emotions and reacting to others. However personal it may be, learning how to smile is a routine task for young people aspiring a job placement as flight attendants in some airlines, which expect their employees the ability to deliver a friendly smile displaying six teeth of the upper dental arcade. Appropriated as part of the flying experience, being assisted by pleasant stewards smiling welcomingly becomes part of the business. A sign of emotions is thus converted into a standardized product designed to suppress the workers’ subjectivity. This power relation over the body requires developing the capacity to conceal one’s sensations and withstand unpleasant circumstances, maintaining an affable countenance.
For The Perfect Smile: Six Teeth Shown, Ming Yuan isolates this facial signal — humanly innate but turned mechanical by consumer logic—as an element representative of the primary condition within labor relations: the exchange of labor power for income. Exploring the complexity of this modern human condition beyond its raw instrumentality, the artist focus on the individual’s power to overcome adversity to guarantee one’s survival.
Nevertheless, each person experiences different limits for resilience, and emotions cannot be indefinitely put on hold. An exercise of patience is rendered in They Are Stretching Her As She Smiles, where a handcrafted biomorphic Mohair net sustains round ceramic elements menacing to take advantage of the interaction produced by gravity and the knitted fabric’s elasticity for falling over the fabricated grins. The tension between the self’s subjectivity and the expected homogeneous human behavior is also explored through the material contrast the installation evokes by overlaying handcraft and computer generated elements.
Prints on the walls play with the friction between feeling overwhelmed and the concealed stress, generating an ambiguity from the glowing green light over the skin of female workers—undecidedly expressing an internal or external state of emergency. Whereas the perfect smile is a requisite achieved via intense training, genuinely grinning is the reward for those who patiently learned to thrive amid adversity.
Victor Zaiden
Photo: Theresa Büchner