X Museum launches second triennial in Beijing

For Hong Kong artist Wing Po So, who is from a family of traditional Chinese medicine doctors, her source of inspiration is inseparable from her emotional bond with the family’s pharmacy.

Growing up surrounded by a potpourri of dried-up medicinal ingredients, the artist is known for using medicinal ingredients and everyday objects to create large-scale installations and sculptures.

“Every medicine cabinet drawer contains a universe and within every organ, there is a cosmological system,” she said in a video introducing her work.

For the triennial, she created Polyglot: Mulberry, an installation consisting of 30-odd glass jars of Chinese medicine in which various parts of the mulberry—fruits, leaves, branches, roots and hosts, are stored. Like how she animated many of her previous artworks (for example, making sea shells move and breathe in the 2020 installation Sea Ear Hi-hat), she connected the dried or ground mulberry parts with small electrical devices so that they could move and make sounds similar to those of wind bells as if they are keen to strike up a conversation with any viewer nearby.