Tree Of Life, 2013

Provenance:
Private Collection, Tornoto
Notes:
Ed Pien's career frequently evokes questions of the body, archetypes, and the convergences of history and beliefs. Tree of Life explores this mutability, fusing together bodies and cultures into a cohesive gestalt. A central trunk fans out in fractal branches, becoming a labyrinth of limbs and figures. Emerging out of the knot are pagodas, birds, other trees; human figures with avian heads hover on the periphery, about to leap off into the air. The sculpture almost denies its material truth: it is thinly made, flattened, delicately cut out of a sheet of aluminum. It has no depth, and no heaviness. Rather, it takes on the image of a shadow puppet, or the large scale paper cutouts that Pien has made previously. As a result, the trees, the figures and structures that comprise the sculpture don't seem to have any tangible weight that would force us to consider them as real, tangible subjects - they are too flimsy, too delicate, too mercurial. The hybridised bodies are malleable and generative, freely able to shift from one form to another as they organise the sculpture: skin becomes feathers becomes wood becomes limbs. These dreamlike, protean drifts don't signal a visual instability but a kind of magic - a willingness to play with the body within the treescape's tangled network.