Early winter in Hangzhou usually comes with a faint mist. As we approached the reflecting pool plaza at Tianmuli, we saw one of the city’s most familiar blue-green taxis standing quietly there. On its body was the well-known Three Pools Mirroring the Moon motif, but where the headlights should have been, the words “NATURE / natural” had been substituted. Not far away, a white flag with blue patterning cracked in the wind, bearing the words “THE SECOND HAND WATER.” The effect was humorous and strange, as if daily life had been given a slight twist.
Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. This was the setting for “Bird Before Peace,” the two-person exhibition by Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir (Inga Svala Thorsdottir & Wu Shanzhuan). Using 400 groups or series and 2,387 works, the exhibition systematically presents the pair’s more than thirty years of artistic collaboration and shared thought since the 1990s, across text, painting, installation, performance, video, and other mediums.
“Wu Shanzhuan and Inga have always been regarded as ‘artists’ artists’ by many artists. You can think of this exhibition as a show by three artists: Wu Shanzhuan and Inga, Wu Shanzhuan, and Inga,” the curator Liu Tian said with a laugh. At the opening, we spoke with the curators Liu Tian and Sun Man about this intriguing exhibition and the singular working method of the artist duo. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. The experience of seeing the show begins outside the museum: the taxi we encountered at the entrance is in fact the artists’ work “NATURE IS A TAXI.”
“At first hearing, the phrase sounds especially absurd, but it’s actually especially true,” Liu Tian said. “What nature and a taxi have in common is that when you encounter them, they are already in operation. You raise your hand and it stops; you use it and it won’t refuse; but when you’re done, you have to pay, or pay a price. Nature is the same.” Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. The “THE SECOND HAND WATER” flag beside it reads like a metaphor puncturing ordinary life.
“The water we use and the water we drink may seem natural, but all of it is second-hand. Nature itself has all been processed,” Liu Tian explained. “The artists want us to realize that what we call ‘nature’ has in fact been repackaged by systems many times over.” Sun Man told us that the curatorial team placed the two works in public space in the hope of allowing “everyone who passes by, whether or not they enter the galleries, to experience a second of mental displacement along their path.”
These two works were made by the artists in the 1990s. “Even then, their thinking was already very liberated. Even with an arid and ‘correct’ subject like environmentalism, they could be so imaginative, with a real sense of dialogue with the present.” We stepped into the first-floor foyer, where dozens of brightly colored neon lights flashed before us: an “index” to the visual language the artists have been generating for decades. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. The first work one encounters on entering the galleries is “FROM PAPER TO PAPER,” an unbroken track of A4 sheets that gathers the artists’ imaginings, drafts, deductions, inspirations, mistakes, and even fully realized works into itself.
Liu Tian said, “I think the A4-paper series presents the whole business of making art, every stage of creation from 0 to 100, how an artist completes a work. You can see all of that in these 600 pieces. There are small drafts for a final work, and there are also works that are complete in themselves, with collages, medicine boxes attached, even a cigarette pasted on.” Wu Shanzhuan once said that mathematicians were what he envied most: with one A4 sheet and one pen, they can create a world. That, too, is where the series gets its name.
Liu Tian told us that these 600 A4 sheets were selected, with the two artists, from more than 4,000 A4 sheets in their studios in Shanghai, Iceland, and Hamburg, Germany. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. Which brings us back to the exhibition’s title, “BIRD BEFORE PEACE”: why such a “strange” name?
“The meaning of ‘Bird Before Peace’ is that birds appeared on earth long before humans, and therefore before concepts like ‘peace’ and ‘war,’ which were invented by humans. The reason we are able to connect birds with peace, and to treat the white dove, for example, as a symbol of peace, is that social culture has continually reinforced and fixed that imagination. The two artists began thinking about this relationship in 1993, and their sustained attention to the ‘fairness of things,’ as well as to the deconstruction and restoration of symbols and meaning, runs through their decades of collaboration.”
That was how the curator Sun Man explained it to us. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. “A bird’s existence always precedes the meaning we assign to it,” Liu Tian added. “We see a white dove as a dove of peace because culture has pressed meaning onto the thing.” In the galleries, the phrase is continually enlarged through countless extensions: in manuscripts, the bird is drawn in the shape of a triangular ruler; in other sketches, it is placed on the armrest of a swivel chair; elsewhere, “BIRD BEFORE PEACE” is written by a street calligrapher. Meaning is repeatedly broken apart and recomposed.
The distinctiveness of the title is matched by an installation unlike most exhibitions we have seen. Rather than dividing the show into chapters, it strings its thread through fourteen “key entries” that have fermented over thirty years of the artists’ work. Viewers encounter them one by one in the act of walking, and gradually register them. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. “TOBUY IS TOCREATE” is a particularly visual experience on site: bar codes are transformed into a minimalist pictorial language, even into a world map, or abstraction in the manner of Malevich.
Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. “They have a series in which they make frames at a 1:1 scale for famous paintings, then turn the color schemes into abstract paintings of colored bar codes. It’s extraordinary,” Liu Tian said. The point, he suggested, is to alert us to the bar code as another world language, a form of abstract order. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. On the other side, standing quietly in a corner, is a series of small sculptures, each with a marvelously unnameable form. They come from the series “THING’S RIGHT[S].”
When the “thing” acquires rights, the human position at the center of the world is gently unsettled.
“When the United Nations issued the Declaration of Human Rights, the two artists replaced every ‘he’ and ‘she’ corresponding to ‘human’ with ‘it,’” Liu Tian said. In fact, the artists are sensing the ideas of freedom and equality expressed in the declaration from a broader perspective. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. “VEGE-PLEASURE” tends to keep visitors standing in front of it for a long time, and often makes them laugh out loud.
The two artists nest all kinds of fruits and vegetables into one another with no rule and no reason at all: a radish inserted into the top of a pumpkin, a pumpkin hollowed out and set together with something else, a banana thrust through a red pepper.
“These are combinations with absolutely no reason behind them, yet they are all placed together on a large canvas, which the artists call a ‘bed.’ The fruits and vegetables slowly rot and disappear together, and that process is itself part of the work,” Liu Tian told us. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir, THE SECOND HAND WATER, 1993. “THE SECOND HAND WATER” moves from outside the building into the galleries. In a video work, the artists pour bottle after bottle of mineral water into Victoria Harbour, an ironic action about “pollution” and “purity.”
“‘In God We Trust’ is a phrase printed on U.S. dollars. The artists changed it to ‘In Second hand, We Trust.’ There is also a Shaanbei paper cut onto which they added the words ‘second-hand reality,’ meaning that all of our reality is second-hand,” Liu Tian explained. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. “NATURE IS A TAXI,” too, extends from the plaza outside into the exhibition, becoming sheet after sheet of sketches: the taxi sign, the dismantling of the call-light, shifts in color, the structure of nature reduced to graphic form.
Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. Another entry concerned with nature is “TEMPERATURE WAR.” Here climate politics are presented, perhaps for the first time, with such humor: temperature is neither cold nor hot, but something between the two. In the gallery there is a painting of a small fox, along with paintings bearing spiral symbols, pointing to the melting of ice sheets under global warming.
“Because Inga is Icelandic, the melting glaciers of nearby Greenland are something she can feel directly. But the melting of Iceland’s glaciers also leads to rising sea levels, which affects the whole globe. So a problem in one place can also be global,” Liu Tian told us. The artists’ inspiration, he said, came from ordering in a restaurant in Hong Kong, where they asked for room-temperature water and the waiter used the phrase ‘temperature water.’
“Translated directly, it would be ‘temperature water.’ That phrase woke them up, and their extreme sensitivity to language led them to create this work.” Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. “YELLOW FLYING” is an immensely interesting, somewhat crazy, and unrealized artistic plan.
At that time, Hong Kong had not yet been returned. Wu Shanzhuan, Wang Guangyi, and Wang Youshen were waiting for a flight in Frankfurt when Wu proposed setting out from Beijing and spending several years transiting through every international airport in the world, finally arriving in Hong Kong on the eve of the 1997 handover.
“Strictly speaking, an international airport does not belong to any country, because once you have left one border control and before you enter another, you do not belong to any national territory. It is an enclave. And the smoking room is an enclave within the enclave. We cannot smoke freely in an airport, but the smoking room is a special space where people can do exceptional things. And the airport smoking room is an exception within the exception.” Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. “PERFECT BRACKET” is the most important visual matrix in the two artists’ work, and also one of the earliest collaborative series after Wu Shanzhuan and Inga met.
“A bracket stands for excess. It stands for a kind of additive infinity in theory. A note inside brackets, for example, can theoretically be longer than the main text. But once the bracket closes, it also becomes something both very little and very much at once. What is that? A black hole. It is the smallest thing and infinitely large, able to contain everything.” That was how Liu Tian explained the meaning of the “bracket” in the work. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. “There are some playful works, for instance two fingernails overlapping to form a perfect bracket.
Or take a book: its cover can also be a perfect bracket. In fact, the perfect bracket is everywhere,” Liu Tian said. In the gallery are early wooden sculptures of the “perfect bracket,” along with all manner of sheets of paper bearing drawn brackets, another way of “opening a hole” in meaning. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. As we climbed to the sixth floor, we could distinctly feel a transition, as if “the air had turned colder.”
The coldness was not emotional but a coolness of artistic logic: the light thinned, the space opened up, the density dropped, and at last one could breathe outside the crush of images. Here, for the first time, Wu Shanzhuan and Inga’s works were explicitly separated. They have never been the sort of artist duo who “merge into one”; they are two lines constantly intersecting and constantly diverging. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. In “BORG,” we encounter Inga’s personal life experience.
“Borg actually means ‘city’ in Icelandic. Iceland is such a small place, with an area roughly the size of Zhejiang, but a population of fewer than 400,000. Zhejiang now has close to 67 million people. So when she came to China, she was shocked by this urbanization and thought, ‘Could I also imagine an ideal city?’” Liu Tian explained. Inga chose a very particular site in which to design the utopia in her mind: the ruins of the place where Norwegians crossed the sea to Iceland and built the first village.
Inga reimagined how a modern city might be built: not just architecture and infrastructure, but, more important, animals, plants, light, thought, and emotion. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. We can also see the artistic practice of “PULVERIZATION,” which Inga had already begun to form before meeting Wu Shanzhuan. At the time, her studio was called “Thor’s Daughter’s Pulverization Services.”
“Icelandic surnames are very particular. They are formed from the father’s name plus son or daughter (dottir). If someone is named Elya Thor, for example, then you know his father’s name is Elya, so he is Elya’s son. So from the name ‘Inga-Svala Thorsdottir,’ you know her father’s name is Thor. Thor is the Norse god of thunder, so she called herself ‘Thor’s daughter.’”
That was how Liu Tian explained it to us. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. The name also relates to the service Inga provided, since Thor has an enormous hammer capable of smashing everything, and Inga’s pulverization service meant that she could turn anything anyone gave her into powder. She would say to museums, for example, “I can pulverize a urinal or a toilet for you.” And based on Duchamp’s blue window in Paris, she this year newly pulverized a Chinese door.
“This is another deconstruction of the rights of things, because once something turns to powder, we can no longer identify it, nor can we use it, and that also means liberation.
The ‘thing’ has acquired its rights,” Liu Tian explained. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. At the same time, this also contains a religious dimension, something like ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ or a world in a grain of sand. At the level of underlying creative impulse, it unexpectedly converges, to a degree, with Wu Shanzhuan’s “HEART SUTRA” series.
“The ‘HEART SUTRA’ also contains the Buddhist concept of emptiness, so the placement of the ‘HEART SUTRA’ and ‘PULVERIZATION’ works was settled first in the entire exhibition,” Liu Tian said.
“From the ’85 period to today, Wu Shanzhuan’s art practice around the Chinese language spans forty years. The newest practice is ‘HEART SUTRA’: first he turns Chinese characters into patterns and motifs, then into swastika forms, the Buddhist swastika, then into four directions, and then into continuous four-way repetition, so that we see language truly become the kind of woven pattern that could be used in textiles. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. The final entry is called “AN EXTRA FOR ALL,” and it functions almost like a breathing hole, giving all the works that belong to no entry, that escape the system, a place to stay.
On view is a series called Unknown Objects. They were originally parts of things with very specific functions, a component inside a refrigerator or on a washing machine, for example, but once we remove them from the whole, they become something we can no longer recognize at all.
“Once it leaves that system, it gains a kind of liberation, it becomes free. The thinking in the work is very light, but extremely subtle,” Liu Tian said. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. Looking across the exhibition as a whole, we also noticed that the typeface on the poster was unlike any we had seen before. “The artists said they believe every great event needs a great typeface, so they specially designed one for this exhibition.”
Liu Tian laughed. “We’re dealing with two artists of extreme creativity and productivity. If they say today that they want to design a typeface, they might start tomorrow and have it finished the day after.”
“Many of the artists’ concepts and key terms were formed in the last century, but the issues they attend to have never fallen out of touch with reality. Some of them have in fact grown more urgent over time. Their observations always begin from everyday life and language, and the scale of this exhibition is enough to let viewers see the many facets of their thought,” the curator Sun Man said. Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s “Bird Before Peace,” By Art Matters, Hangzhou, 2025. Photography: Jiang Liuliu. Thinking back to those entries on the first floor, one gradually realizes that the pair’s decades-long collaboration is not a matter of supplementing one another, or of each completing one half, but of continually expanding the other’s universe, like a crisscrossing network.
From the taxi to the A4 sheets, from second-hand water to pulverization, from bird before peace to the declaration of the rights of things, the two artists take apart and reassemble the world we have grown used to, hoping that at some moment it will resonate with our own experience of being alive.