Artwork Appreciation
Sugar has always been an expensive cash crop and a luxury product in human history, but its status has changed in today’s fitness culture. The artist Lo Yi-Chun has thus remade sugarcane bagasse molds into fitness equipment and used mirrors to reflect on people’s present-day extreme pursuit of appearances. The shapes used in this series of works, “Protein Fitness Panels,” which won the 2021 Taipei Art Award, show the four stages by which protein transforms into muscle tissue. This particular work shows the second-level structure of the alpha helix, which has a chain-like appearance. The English phrase in the work’s title, “No silver bullet,” is an idiom meaning that no problem can be solved instantly—which motivates people to spend long hours in the gym to maintain their physiques. The bullet-shaped dumbbells not only respond to the theme, but also indicate the process of pouring syrup into cone-shaped molds in early sugar factories in order to form the forerunner of “sugar cubes.” The entire series is designed to open up a dialogue between sugar and fitness.