Nüwa’s Garden is a summer exhibition rooted in clay, myth, and elemental transformation. Presented by a poco art collective in collaboration with Charles Arnoldi Studio, the exhibition brings together the works of 24 artists across ceramics, fiber, sculpture, painting, print, and performance. Inspired by ecofeminist thought and East Asian cosmology, the show illuminates the feminine forces of nature—from maternal waters to the alchemy of clay and fire—offering a sensorial and symbolic experience of renewal rather than a didactic call to action.
Grounded in an interdisciplinary framework, Nüwa’s Garden as a curatorial idea draws from ecofeminist theory, comparative mythology, and material culture studies. Echoing Carolyn Merchant’s vision of a regenerative, earth-based cosmology and Vandana Shiva’s articulation of
embodied ecological knowledge, the exhibition foregrounds creation not as conquest but as care. Nüwa—the goddess who sculpted humanity from clay—offers an archetype of
world-building through feminine labor and elemental intimacy. Mythographers from Joseph Campbell to Anne Birrell have traced such cosmic repair narratives across cultures, while scholars of Shan Hai Jing point to the hybrid creatures and unstable terrains that echo throughout the exhibition. In dialogue with Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art and Glenn Adamson’s studies of craft and agency, the use of clay and textile becomes more than medium—it becomes ritual, cosmology, and resistance.
Through a sinological lens, the exhibition also engages with Wu Hung’s writing on myth and materiality in Chinese visual culture, situating Nüwa not merely as symbol, but as an enduring presence in the shaping of cosmological space and ecological imagination.
At its heart lies the myth of Nüwa, the primordial goddess in Chinese cosmology who created humanity from yellow earth and repaired the heavens after a great cataclysm. When the pillars of heaven collapsed and floods consumed the earth, she melted five-colored stones to patch the sky. When the stones proved insufficient, she used her own body to seal the remaining fissures—ultimately sacrificing herself to hold the world together. Nüwa’s Garden reimagines this act of creation and repair as a healing gesture for our own fractured times. The exhibition honors the summer solstice not only as a celestial threshold but as a moment of offering: to earth, to each other, and to the invisible threads that bind us.
Curated as an energetic and spatial flow, the exhibition follows the Five Phases (五行, wu xing)—earth, fire, water, metal, and wood—infused with principles of Feng Shui. This layout invokes an ecology of balance, movement, and attunement, reflecting East Asian cosmological thought in
both structure and sensibility.
Marking a rare public opening of Charles Arnoldi’s private studio—a site of enduring artistic experimentation—the exhibition grounds itself at the threshold with Arnoldi’s Milestone (2001), a totemic bronze potato sculpture. Installed at the 玄關 (xuan guan), the Feng Shui “mystery gate,” this rooted and witty presence honors the building’s former life as a potato chip factory and sets the tone for a space animated by legacy and transformation.
Clay and potato—both humble, yet earthen and generative materials—form a symbolic bridge between sustenance and myth, feminine and masculine creative force. In thelegend of Nüwa, the goddess shaped the first humans by hand from yellow earth, and later, to seed life more rapidly, flung droplets of mud from a vine. Echoing this dual act of care and efficiency, Arnoldi’s sculptural potato elevates the staple food of the poor into a monument of playful gravity, merging masculine materiality with quiet reverence. Nüwa’s Garden thus offers a vision of restoration through tactile, ancestral processes—where clay is both a creation myth and a living, feminine medium for shaping new worlds.
“This is not Eden’s garden, where obedience is rewarded and knowledge punished. This is Nüwa’s Garden, where creation is messy, maternal, and experimental,” says curator Ann Shi, founder of a poco art collective. “This is not a climate protest or a didactic manifesto. It is a ritual in slowness, an ecology of sensation.”
