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The Domestication: Taboo Love (abbreviated as The Domestication) interprets humanity as a site of mutation and degeneration. On one hand, humans pursue progress and create civilization; on the other, they use 'civilization' to constrain and control human nature, stripping individuals of their innate selves and original context to become 'civilized' in the universal sense.
The work understands the falseness of the contemporary subject as a material reality. This falseness yields real consequences, as matter domesticates real people, gradually shaping and molding them into the form of 'material reality,' ultimately turning them into objects—containers of thought, sensation, and emotion.
Domestication is a form of natural selection with human participation, a milestone in the origin of human civilization. It is also fundamentally an interactive process, establishing stable relationships through gradual, continuous interaction. The Domestication expands from the morphology of plants and the concept of time-lapse photography, using the movement of plants and objects to 'domesticate' humans. It 'hybridizes' the images and movements of people, plants, and objects, continuously splitting, pairing, and recombining them to ceaselessly shape, disrupt, and deconstruct bodily expression and the stability of the body's image.
Thematically, The Domestication attempts to challenge binary logic, focusing on the human and non-human, movement and stillness, truth and falsehood, essence and appearance. In reality, contradictions (or conflicts) are not always oppositional; refined, delicate, complete forms can also contain roughness, fragmentation, and distortion. Love is a form of domestication, a relationship built to become the unique 'me' in your eyes. Beauty often contains opposition or resistance.
In The Domestication, the body's 'form' and 'movement' are inseparable from expression. The body, constantly generating movement and image, is always expressing, continually evoking sensation and emotion, arriving at and departing from locations. As meaning is constantly generated and shattered, the binary logic of 'utopia' and 'no future' is slowly extended and challenged.
Through the development of movements such as caressing (hands), eating (mouth), and trembling (muscles), The Domestication presents materials and scenes that are both refined and wild, systematic and fragmented, distorted yet familiar. The work attempts to provide the audience with a surprising aesthetic experience within the entangled hybridization of humans, plants, and objects.
The Domestication: Taboo Love is a new practical creation in Wu Hui's Scenic Area series. Here, the 'growing body' tightly binds together unrelated, sometimes even self-contradictory concepts and/or images. This 'binding' not only roughly ties two opposing substances together to emphasize the intervention and manipulation of an external force but also attempts to reveal the confused, contradictory characteristics within a single concept or image—an essential, substantial, unchanging reality that transcends the material world.
