Over the past month, Precious Okoyomon has been spending time in Shanghai during their residency at CHERUBY. Their studio will be open to the public on 10 November.

Okoyomon’s practice, in their words, “moves through everything I love all the time, spilling over between sculpture, drawing, installation, food and living environments. It explores the unconscious, vulnerability and the strange forms of intimacy that emerge between bodies, objects and other living things.” It asks how tenderness and violence inhabit the same world, and how histories of racial violence continue to shape the relationships to the body, care and the possibility of belonging.

For the Open Studio, Okoyomon shares drawings made during their time in Shanghai, alongside sculptures from CHERUBY founder Cherry Xu’s collection. These include one of their bears from last year’s Paris show, It’s important to have ur fangs out at the end of the world, and works from their lynched stuffed animals series I wanted to kill but had nothing to kill. In the artist’s words:
“These works approach violence through the uncanny familiarity of the stuffed animal, an object associated with childhood, comfort, and attachment, transformed into a site of racial terror. By placing this familiar figure in proximity to the history of lynching, the work considers how violence becomes embedded in the objects and gestures through which we learn to love, fear, and recognize one another. The innocent is never innocent.”

The drawings come from a slower pace. Away from their usual world in New York, Okoyomon found in Shanghai “a space to slow down”, and returned to drawing “as a way of thinking”: following images before they fully become objects, and staying with things that have not yet found their final form. They describe the residency as “a kind of suspension, a time outside of time” in which ideas can shift, mutate and begin again, and as a place of “deep peace” and “space to breathe”.