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Min-Jia: World of Interiors

_{20 September - 15 November 2025}

PODIUM is proud to present ‘World of Interiors’, Urumqi-born, Berlin-based artist Min-Jia’s first solo exhibition in their career and with the gallery. Built upon their apprenticeship in Shaanxi Huaxian shadow puppetry under master Wang Tianwen in Xi’an, China, this body of work samples and remixes traditional techniques, materials, and ornamental forms across cultures, creating an enigmatic site from which to investigate the interior life of the migrant. Drawing from the analysis of how economic and migratory cycles construct subjectivities in Chinese-Australian writer Aurelia Guo’s eponymous book, as well as the artist’s experience in the transnational Asian diaspora, the exhibition fractures and recycles narratives of transformation to destabilise myths of origin and identity.

The exhibition opens on 20 September (Saturday) from 2 to 7 pm and is on view until 15 November (Saturday).

Artist
Min-Jia

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Min-Jia draws from a rich library of ornamental references, including Chinese folk art, orientalist kitsch, Art Nouveau works by queer and women artists, and Boys’ Love and Girls’ Love anime. In Chinese, the term for ornament, encompassing both disguise (裝) and enhancement (飾), carries dual meanings—to make believe and to camouflage one’s identity. Their practice mobilises the artificial and ornamental as tactics to traverse hostile environments, amping up the intensity of traditional forms—a botanical motif, a domestic interior—till they are eroticised, threatening, and writhing with life. In pace with the artist’s literary touchstones Aurelia Guo and Hiromi Ito, vitality and artificiality are in a constant dialectic, and neither is original: the idea of 'nature' is meaningless here. Following the words of Anne Anlin Cheng in her book Ornamentalism, their interchange drives healing: 'the flesh that passed through objecthood needs ornament as a way back to itself.'

This reciprocity between flesh and objecthood is inherent to the processes of shadow puppetry. The artist revives vellum—chemically treated cow skin—into a pliable, temperamental material that reacts to its environment like living flesh. Thousands of cuts and punctures reveal the motif before it is painted, dried, and assembled into a puppet substantial enough to endure performance. Like the artist Guo Fengyi, who drew as a practical exercise to guide energy through the meridians of her sick body, Min-Jia’s practice rhymes with their experience living with chronic illness. Puppetry forces the rhythms of the studio to take a methodical pace, starting and stopping to let the material dry, hydrate, stretch, or shrink. It involves both an intuitive sensitivity to the conditions of work and a confident willingness to distort and reshape flesh.

The resultant puppet is a ghostly fantasy whose material nevertheless continues to reassert itself. As it is disassembled and reassembled for transit, it bends and changes dimension in response to heat and humidity, its ornamental, translucent joints (mirroring the artist’s painful joints) holding the juxtaposition between strength and fragility. Shaanxi shadow puppetry is a migratory art form which has fallen on both sides of the centre and periphery distinction throughout its history. Its narratives originate in the imperial court, where it was produced by and for concubines, and later proliferated and regionalised by travelling troupes who told local stories alongside court operas. Today, the remaining practitioners are being integrated into a new myth of national cultural heritage, as China seeks to reconstruct its post-Cultural Revolution history. Simultaneously, it has left traces throughout the Western world and beyond stemming from the trafficking of Orientalist design traditions.

The history of Shaanxi puppetry reveals the insufficiency of discourses regarding authenticity, 'high art', appropriation, and national culture. It resonates with the exhibition’s titular source, Aurelia Guo’s World of Interiors, which tracks how the work of survival for those on the margins engenders an aesthetic mixture of poverty and opulence, bringing together traditions which otherwise define themselves in opposition to one another. In turn, its title is borrowed from the British design magazine which made its name off the promise of exclusive access to the domestic lives of the world’s bourgeoisie and pedigreed. It revealed interiors imbued with porcelain, folk art, and imported furniture. Despite their supposed tradition and antiquity, the status of these spaces was constructed by a distinctly modern global interchange dependent on the labour of the abject and excluded—rural people, migrants, and queers. This exhibition draws on the temporary interiors of travelling puppetry troupes to reconstruct a parallel domestic sphere, where the vitality of these aesthetic forces can be let loose to play.

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Exhibition Preview

Min-Jia, The Seed III, 2024 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and PODIUM, Hong Kong.
Min-Jia, Mother IV, 2024-2025 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and PODIUM, Hong Kong.
Min-Jia, The Seed I, 2024 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and PODIUM, Hong Kong.

Works

Min-Jia
The Seed I
2024
Oil and mineral pigments on canvas
70 x 180 cm | 27.6 x 70.9 in