Ying Xu: ‘In the series ‘Opulence Rewritten’, I work with antique wooden shoe molds, once purely utilitarian tools of craft and domestic labor, now recast as sculptural carriers of memory and tension.
The wooden shoe mold, once a tool for shaping the body’s trace, is painted with Chinese patterns of birds, mountains, and ornamental motifs, recalling porcelain and textile traditions. It exists simultaneously as artifact and invention: past and present layered on a single surface. The painted shoe steps beyond the frame of illusion into the viewer’s space, collapsing the distance between representation and reality, and inviting reflection on what it means to carry, and to reinvent, cultural heritage.’
