Long Museum’s cast concrete structure, with its vaulted interiors, greatly interested Gormley when the institution invited him to exhibit in Shanghai. He saw the compound as a series of unified forms—not unlike the results of the sculptor’s own casting process—or “buildings that are like skulls,” as Gormley stated during an afternoon talk prior to the show’s opening. The artist quite literally humanizes the first floor spaces while fulfilling one of his fundamental tenets as an artist to make “sculpture that interrogates its environment.”

The exhibition’s centerpiece is the sprawling installation Critical Mass II (1995), consisting of 60 life-sized, cast-iron figures in 12 fixed positions: fetal, squatting, sitting, kneeling, standing, with several figures suspended by their feet at varying heights and bound by heavy industrial cable. Upon entering the museum’s main gallery space, a long diagonal arrangement of these figures suggests an illustrated timeline charting human evolution, while others are scattered throughout the space, some kneeling or couching against the walls, isolated or off by themselves. We are also confronted by a disconcerting pile of bodies as if waiting to be dumped into a mass grave.

The imperfections in the casts—from the original plaster body casts to the sand moulds and metal pourings—are visibly retained as surface evidence of the work’s process and industrial genesis. While Critical Mass was made some 20 years ago in a direct response to a specific site—an old tram storage station in Vienna—the work continues to evoke a powerful sense of vulnerability, loss and anonymity. Gormley refers to Critical Mass as an “anti-monument evoking the victims of the 20th century” that “communicates the useless status of sculpture itself.” But knowing the work’s origin, it isn’t difficult to think of trains departing for Auschwitz or Dachau.

If there were any missteps in this exhibition, it might be the presentation of Breathing Room IV [Rio] (2012), one of Gormley’s abstract architectural environments. Constructed from photo-luminescent, blue cuboid frames that form walk-through passageways, the work functions in ten-minute intervals: ten minutes of darkness followed by an intense 40-second blast of light to recharge and reactivate the structures. Object as experience has been one of Gormley’s central ideas, but this work falls too easily into the realm of throwbacks to the 1960s or ’70s, when a handful of artists made names for themselves by working with space and light. It didn’t hold the same impact as seeing one of his solitary figures standing precariously close to the edge of a distant rooftop, and failed to carry the visceral power or poetic engagement with the static body in space.