In Ruoru Mou’s works, stains and residues are often as important as the things that caused them. In 25 Years Aged Soy Sauce (2023), the artist repurposed a soy-stained table cover from her family’s Chinese restaurant in Florence to produce a workwear jacket of the same pattern as the one she often wears in her studio. Made from wax cotton, the material is normally hidden between a white tablecloth and a wooden tabletop, providing an invisible layer of protection for a table that is rarely ever seen uncovered. Imbuing the readymade with an important process of transformation, Mou not only makes visible twenty-five years of meals consumed by customers, she also chooses to place this history on her shoulders, a history now protecting her own body.

Glucose, used restaurant fat and gelatine are some of the other materials that have given form to Mou’s recent sculptural works. Departing from recipes found on the internet to produce prosthetics like the ones made for sci-fi films, the artist applies her alchemic experience of producing ceramic glazes to develop her concoctions. The use of everyday ingredients demand that Mou gives herself to culinary experimentation, and this process of trial and error often results in monotonous and intensive actions that connect her labour as an artist to various other chains of production. The results are often uncanny creations that resemble leather, marble or even untreated animal skin. But unlike these materials and the processed consumer goods they become within a market economy, Mou often recycles different types of industrial waste as a way of literally and metaphorically digesting them.

Seeking to unpack the personal and collective implications of these various forms of consumption and waste, the artist’s new body of work creates an immersive environment that forms connections between the Chinese restaurant and fashion industries in Italy, and their respective employment of foreign workers. From a grease trap that usually prevents the blocking of drainage systems, to a series of casted and tanned sheets of “leather” Mou creates from grease, starch, soy and other ingredients that transform upon contact with the atmosphere, the artist creates a chain of digestion and regeneration through which these materials are freed from being treated as either real or fake, legitimate or illegitimate. Creating further connections between questions of value and authenticity, each sheet of “leather” is stamped with Mou’s grandfather’s seals alongside a factory code fashioned by the artist based on the product codes of the French luxury brand Celine, marking the sheets with the artist’s initials and the dates they were cast. By inviting us into the spaces of production at the back of a kitchen and a leather tannery, Mou points to the labour that is often hidden in these environments. Whether in the making of food or luxury bags, the artist highlights both the safety and the violence that can be experienced through being rendered invisible.

Curator Eliel Jones