On the second floor of Shanghai’s Power Station of Art (PSA), the two-person exhibition “HON” attempted to construct a cross-cultural and -generational conversation between two pioneering artists whose practices have explored gender and the female experience: the late French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle and Paris-based Chinese contemporary artist Shen Yuan. Curated by PSA director Gong Yan, the exhibition featured more than 65 works by Saint Phalle, including sculptures, works on paper, archival materials and videos, as well as 16 significant works by Shen, dating from her early days in France (she moved there in the 1990s) to the present.

The title “HON,” meaning “she” in Swedish, was borrowed from Saint Phalle’s 1966 site-specific sculpture of the same name, commissioned by the Moderna Museet of Stockholm and exhibited as HON – en katedral (“She – A Cathedral”). Constructed like an indoor castle with an accessible inside, HON takes the shape of Saint Phalle’s signature “Nana” figure—a sculptural, plump female body—but in a reclining posture with legs spread open. Visitors at the Moderna Museet were invited to enter the 23.5-meter-wide structure through an orifice between HON’s legs, symbolizing, in Saint Phalle’s words, “a return to the womb.” Provocative even in the context of Second Wave feminism, HON conveyed Saint Phalle’s deconstruction of the inferior, submissive social role of women through her tribute to the female body. As a response, the Chinese title of the PSA exhibition featured the deconstructed Chinese character for “she” (她), separating the left and right radicals. The dismantled character, according to a text written by Shen in the exhibition catalogue, disassembles the fixed gender role of a woman, a theme inherent in the two artists’ practices. 

Given that Shen and Saint Phalle had never met, Saint Phalle’s granddaughter Bloum Cardenas was instrumental in connecting the two artists. In preparation for the exhibition, Shen and Cardenas visited Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden (1998), a sculpture garden located in Tuscany. The visit inspired Shen to transform the platform on PSA’s second floor into a “Tarot Garden” of sorts with the newly commissioned installation La Jardin (2018), meaning “the garden” in French. The work is composed of a hollow, six-meter-tall, corset-shaped structure made of steel, mesh net, and barbed wire, in front of a barn-shaped structure with a metal foundation, loaded with plants and fishing nets. Visitors are invited to explore the hollow metal structures, while a hidden camera captures the activity inside the “corset” and live streams the footage on an iPad inconspicuously mounted on the exterior of the structure. The intended effect on visitors of provoking surprise, self-consciousness and the sense of needing to behave with caution when they eventually realize the surveillance serves as a reminder of constant social policing—particularly of women in patriarchal societies—echoing Saint Phalle’s call for a reclaiming of one’s individual identity in opposition to restrictive, socially constructed gender norms.