Liang Shaoji is a Chinese artist with a practice revolving around a unique materiality. He works with silkworms to create art installation work, sometimes on a massive scale. The artist also integrates sculpture, textiles, and even film works into his installations. Shaoji has participated in several solo and group art exhibition shows and has garnered a great deal of acclaim in both his native China and abroad. The artist continues to engage wholeheartedly with the intensive process of silkworm rearing, and could not be contacted for an interview by STIR, for this very reason.

Silkworms are acutely sensitive to their environmental conditions, especially temperature and relative humidity, which must be monitored and altered carefully per the various stages of the worms’ life cycles. These include their incubation, growth, the five instances of moulting most silkworms go through, and finally, their cocoon spinning. The silk that we use to weave clothes is the material these worms use to spin their cocoons. Throughout this process, the silkworms must be handled delicately, usually with a brush, and dead and diseased worms must be shifted out regularly.

Shaoji’s sensitivity extends to the other materials he uses in his work. For example, the artist has acknowledged in a previous interview that worms do not like being kept on iron. In another conversation, he mentioned bringing the matter up with researchers, who theorised that their affinity for (mulberry) leaves is tied to a preference for lignin, a complex polymer that combines with cellulose to form wood. Hence, their preference is to be in contact with paper. Another trait that the contemporary artist has observed among silkworms is that they naturally seek out higher ground, and if he is not careful, they will travel up the house he rear them in, falling from the roof as they begin to spin, which may be lethal. This necessitates that the artist constantly keep a watchful eye over the worms, which can force Shaoji to stay awake for days at a time as young silkworms need very little sleep.

The difficulty of Shaoji’s conceptual art practice does not end with making his work. As Shan Xueping, Director, ShanghART Gallery explains, his works must also be given high-temperature dehydration treatment to ensure that the silk proteins remain in a stable state.

Once the artist’s silkworms begin spinning their silk, he will alter their usual figure-8 path in order to direct them where he wants them to go. This is the bedrock of his artmaking. Over the course of his career, Shaoji has mastered the art of not only rearing silkworms but also of herding them in order to create complex forms out of their silk. Shaoji’s latest presentation was Sea of the Cloud, a solo show that was held at the Sea World Culture and Arts Center in Shenzhen from March 24 - June 26. The show began with a 28-metre-long, 4-screen video installation titled Deeply Sea Horizon (2018 - 2024), which features a massive iron chain placed before an endless ocean, that the artist considers to be a metaphor for the strength and fragility of human life in a sea of turmoil.

While Sea of the Cloud was a fantastic introduction to Shaoji’s installation art for newer audiences, as well as a reminder of its grandiosity for those who are familiar with him, it would be enriching for international art lovers to see his work exhibited overseas more often. Liang Shaoji’s work with silkworms stands within the contemporary art world as a truly inimitable practice.