Shan Hua Solo Show-Loquat Tendons Severed

2025/11/1

Text by Ese Onojeruo

Sarabande Foundation is currently presenting Shan Hua: Loquat Tendons Served. Shan Hua’s practice occupies the intersection of literature, digital media, and installation, positioning narrative as a site of rupture and reassembly, where fragments of text, memory, and technology converge to explore the conditions of existence.

In this exhibition, A Loquat Tendon Severed, Hua investigates perspectives at the margins, including historically silenced literary figures, cross-temporal dialogues, and subtle presences such as shadows. Her work stages exchanges between voices, spaces, and cultures, tracing how understanding, reflection, and emotional resonance emerge through encounter and dialogue.

For this presentation, Hua has created a new five-channel installation, A Loquat Breaks Tendon, in which historical figures, literature and the digital converse, respond, and reflect, inviting contemplation of memory, identity, and marginality. The room itself functions as both stage and metaphor, allowing narrative to unfold in fragments.

Across the exhibition, the space becomes a vessel for reflection in an environment where stories, shadows, and voices at the margins resonate, encouraging audiences to engage in dialogue with time, text, and memory.

Like a Loquat with its Tendons Severed

This experimental mockumentary traces a thousand-year search for an elusive, invisible figure. Presented as a multi-screen installation, it reimagines female figures drawn from both Eastern and Western literary canons: Lady Macbeth from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Feng Qingyang from Swordsman, the fox spirit from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai), and the female historian from Possession. Once relegated to the margins of their source narratives, these women are reinterpreted and granted voices of their own.

Through intimate, interview-style monologues, they revisit their pasts, reflecting on identity, intergenerational trauma, and cultural displacement within an absurd, cross-cultural landscape. Blending live action, motion capture, and animation, the work confronts the psychological conditions of contemporary life, female trauma, diasporic unease, and the pervasive saturation of information.

My Friend, Fear Not

My Friend, Fear Not centres on a contemporary protagonist who, in an attempt to escape the pressures of modern life, inadvertently enters the home of Josef K. from Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Trial. The house is empty; the only voice emanates from a mask suspended on the wall.

Through a dialogue between the visitor and the disembodied voice, two contrasting sensibilities, one pragmatic, one romantic, engage in an evolving conversation on beauty, death, existence, and affection. Their exchange transitions from confrontation to understanding, from alienation to a form of mutual solace.

In this work, Hua subverts traditional literature genres and cinematic techniques, foregrounding the instability of the contemporary subject. The work examines fractured identity, generational trauma, and the fragmentation of information as defining characteristics of postmodern consciousness.

You Asked About the Cat Wearin' My Scarf

There’s a saying that you can identify a ghost by whether they have a shadow - those without shadows are considered ghosts.

A shadow is a quiet companion to life, seemingly useless yet always there. It follows us from the beginning, like the subconscious - ever-present, though we rarely feel its existence.

In You Asked About the Cat Wearin’ My Scarf, Shan Hua animates the shadow of a cartoon-like virtual figure. The shadow hums softly, embodying a subtle form of human presence. The artist remarks, “That’s something I often do myself.” The act of humming, unconscious yet expressive, becomes a method of self-observation, a means of perceiving one’s own shadow in motion.

Through this quiet gesture, the work contemplates the ontology of digital being: Does a virtual entity require a shadow? Or is the shadow, paradoxically, the ultimate proof of existence?

You Asked About the Cat Wearin’ My Scarf extends Shan Hua’s ongoing inquiry into the relationship between the virtual and the embodied, the conscious and the unconscious, and the poetic potential of the everyday gesture.

Curated by Ese Onojeruo Produced by Hui Chen

Sponsored by D&H Innovation, Redress

Loquat Tendons Served

30th October - 3rd November

Sarabande Foundation, 22 Hertford Rd, London N1 5SH