#ren ri

[miamaimania]

Behold Ren Ri's Honeycomb Masterpieces: A Delicate Dance of Art and Nature

[oculablog]

Ren Ri Yuansu II- #6-47, #6-16, #6-15, #6-22, 2013-14/2014-15 Acrylic box, natural beeswax Courtesy Pearl Lam Galleries.

[e-m--emili]

The biggest challenge for my work is how to integrate “time”. The bees have their own natural time, which is different from human time’s algorithm. My involvement represents man-made time. My works is the finally fruit of the integration of the two different time, which is need to be harmonized.

Ren Ri

[e-m--emili]

Yuansu Series II, #6-22, 2013–14, Acrylic box, natural beeswax, 40 x 40 x 40 cm, Ren Ri

Ren Ri is a Beijing-based biomedia artist and beekeeper whose work investigates the relationship between humanity and nature. While Ri now considers himself more beekeeper than artist, he holds a PhD in Fine Art from Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He came into beekeeping and his chosen artistic medium, beeswax, from a deep appreciation for insect ethnology and the process of moulding.

Central to Ren Ri’s practice is the concept of Yuansu. For Ri, Yuansu acts as a portmanteau to describe the duality between the tension which becomes the foundation of life, yuan, and the relation formed by two entwined life forms, su. Investigating the structural relation between bees and humanity and the influence of coordination, collaboration and disruption are recurrent themes in his work.

[2t2r]

Les sculptures par des abeilles de Ren Ri

Nouvel article publié sur https://www.2tout2rien.fr/les-sculptures-par-des-abeilles-de-ren-ri/

Les sculptures par des abeilles de Ren Ri

[nununiverse]

Ren Ri HYPERPARALLÈLE #1, #2, #3, #4 , 2015. https://ocula.com/artists/ren-ri/

[e-m--emili]

Ren Ri interview: 

You use bees and beeswax which is considered an unusual and difficult material to work with. What were the biggest challenges you faced for its development? What about bringing your creations into a gallery set-up?

The biggest challenge for my work is how to integrate “time”. The bees have their own natural time, which is different from human time’s algorithm. My involvement represents man-made time. My works is the finally fruit of the integration of the two different time, which is need to be harmonized.

Every single piece of my works is an independent unit, just like LEGO toys which can be split or assembled very easily to set up in museum, gallery or other venues.

What are the main observations regarding human and bees behaviour in an interspecies collaboration context that you’ve obtained by working with?

Through the long time cooperation with bees, I have abstracted the bees’ constructing algorithm and bees’ unique behaviour algorithm. Although we are different species, our relationships exist in the material, energy exchange and regeneration.  Through this process, I find out  and got the bees modelling and shaping formula.  On the other hand, bees have gained more food and energy . We established truly trust.

(http://www.clotmag.com/ren-ri)

[drownmeinbeauty]

WAX FIGURES

Artist Ren Ri’s beeswax sculptures sit at the intersection of biology and technology, nature and artifice, animal and apparatus.  For this series the Chinese artist constructed clear acrylic boxes, large enough to hold bowling balls, and filled them with swarms of bees.  Every so often, as the hives were growing, he rotated the boxes and repositioned the queens.  Afterwards he flushed the insects and honey from the cages, leaving the empty rippled, folded beeswax forms inside.  These look, from up close, like abandoned post-nuclear landscapes and, from across the room, look like the desicated organs of a prehistoric beast.

There’s a strange tension between the tidy hexagonal structure of the hives and their bulging, swollen contours.  The cells gives these works a pixellated look, as if they've been modeled with a computer program.  They don’t seem to recognize gravity, as the beeswax congeals equivalently to all interior faces of the cube.  And they don’t seem to recognize Cartesian geometry, their soft, tissue-like clumps evoking a shambolic, bodily logic.  Though they offer rich compositions, the wax formations don’t lend themselves to contemplation.  Stuffed within the antiseptic plastic boxes, they’re charged with physical potential, as if they’re about to come to life, to change, to grown.

Photo courtesy of Ren Ri and Pearl Lam Galleries.