The eternal combat (or dance) between nature and culture, or, in traditional psychosexual terms, female and male, always gets reliable critical ink, but the artwork under discussion usually makes the rather banal point that we increasingly live in a mediated, artificial world of our own design--sad in certain respects, but not terribly interesting. Shen Shaomin, a mid-career artist who grew up as a Communist propagandist and developed, self-taught, into an independent, "heterodox" artist in the 1980s, has created a group of sculptures based on the techniques used to create bonsai trees, which he likens to foot-binding, the painful process that deformed women's feet into dainty budlike stumps. Both inflict cruelty for our esthetic delectation; they create "artificial forms that distort the natural order of growth. Both result in the abuse of the body.... both are processes in which deformity is violently imposed in order to fulfill the desire of personal taste."

Bonsai No. 42

What viewers see is the familiar picturesque Ficus plants usually cited as proof of the Oriental love of nature, but here exposed with all the constraint paraphernalia from bonsai workshops in Anhui, Ningguo and Xuancheng left in place. The plants are trapped amid iron clamps, braces, wires and armatures; held beneath disks of metal mesh (strange halos) to inhibit their growth; and contained in ceramic pots labeled with high-minded, poetic terms like "peaceful transcendence," according to curator Josh Yiu. These are vegetal analogues to Goya's solitary prisoners, shackled, caged, and maimed by the Inquisition (yes, we Occidentals value the sanctity of the individual!), or Sue Coe's factory farm animals, or Frida in her cruel corsets. Il faut souffrir pour être belle.

Bonsai No. 37

The paradox, of course, is that these pathos-infused works are so perversely beautiful even as they make us cringe. In Bonsai No. 43, the turnbuckled clamps and the rod to which they're affixed create a kind of rib cage and arm for the serpentining trunk, its leafy head just touching the grating disk above it, like a fish surfacing to feed. In No. 41 the wires restraining the springlike coil of the trunk transform it into an image of Laocoon-like heroic struggle beneath the square halo used for living saints in Christian art. In No. 51, a "frozen sculpture," i.e., dead plant, the bare branches reach skyward toward the grating, toward an untouchable cruciform hand crank topping a threaded steel rod. In No. 9, No. 37 and No. 42, the woody parts twist into torso-like structures reminiscent of classical sculpture and painting. Remember Bernini's marble statue of a frightened Daphne, pursued by an amorous Apollo, and frozen in the process of escaping, transformed into a laurel tree? Kenneth Clark in The Nude classified figuration into a handful of themes; Shen combines Clark's themes of Energy and Pathos with his Alternative Convention, which emphasizes not our glorious animal mobility and beauty, but the earthy, clayey origins and final disposition of "bulblike women and rootlike men."

Such ultimate, teleological concerns, of course, tend to put capitalist fantasies of undying wealth into perspective. Shen is interested in how the new technology and the old hunger for transcendental meaning--C.P. Snow's "two cultures" of science and art--affect the balance of nature as life becomes both more prosperous and denatured. His works ask us to question our assumptions about being in control, with the power to enforce our esthetic or other standards on what we perceive as "lesser breeds." Shen: "Our behavior and our environment are under control. When we were born, we were controlled by our parents, then when we went to school we were controlled by our teachers, then we go to work, and we're controlled by our bosses. We are all creatures under control, but we also want to manipulate other people to get what we want. Like how America wants to control the world. We always live in an environment where we are controlled, but meanwhile we are all trying to manipulate others, and manipulate nature to suit ourselves."

Thousand Hand Guanyin Bodhisattva

Also showing is one of Shen's unforgettable, bizarre bone-and-cast-bone sculptures, Thousand Hand Guanyin Bodhisattva, a full-sized eight-armed skeleton of the Buddhist/Taoist goddess of mercy. She sits with her metal armature before an array of nine Pyrex alchemical apparatuses with beaker, coils and tubing, each containing one of variously sized fetal skeletons, each in its dedicated bell jar.

Shen Shaomin: Experimental Studio will be on view at Frey Norris Gallery September 4-29, 2008.