New York, NY (March 29, 2023)—High Line Art, which organizes public art programming and installations displayed along the High Line, today announces its commissioned artworks for Spring 2023. Each year, High Line Art collaborates with an international array of artists—both emerging and established—to produce new artworks inspired by the unique setting of the park. The season begins with two large sculptures made of soap and concrete by Chinese artist Yu Ji that will be on view in April—her first solo presentation in New York City—and continues with a large adobe figure by Argentinian artist Gabriel Chaile in May and an inscribed architectural  archway by American artist Baseera Khan in June. Organized by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art and Melanie Kress, Curator of High Line Art, each artwork will be on view on the High Line for a full year. 

Yu Ji 
Column-Untitled No.3, 2023
On view April 2023 through March 2024

Yu Ji (b. 1985, Shanghai, China) lives in Shanghai, China. Known for a diverse artistic practice, Yu creates installations and sculptures that come alive over the course of their exhibition. Her installations incorporate changing elements like liquids and live plants that shift and morph from day to day. Yu’s sculptures often hold a tension between their anthropomorphic forms—such as arms, thighs, and knees—and the solid building materials like cast concrete and rebar they’re made from. Yu thinks of making sculptures as a performative process, as she decomposes the gestures and steps of sculptural practice into her videos and performances.

An extensive interest in the natural living world can be seen in many of Yu’s works. For the High Line, Yu creates a new set of sculptures in conversation with the plants in the park’s renowned gardens. Located on the High Line at 20th Street, Column-Untitled No.3 comprises two twisting columns whose design reflects magnified images of the Equisetum—an over 100 million-year-old family of ferns—growing on the park. The work references the practice of early 20th century photographer Karl Blossfeldt, known for his highly detailed black-and-white photographs of plants, as well as the teachings on architectural botanical ornamentation by early 19th century German theologian Moritz Meurer. Drawing on Blossfeldt’s research on ancient forms of plants, Yu opens the question of whether plants are themselves a pure form of art. The columns Yu makes are cast in concrete and soap, which will change in color and form over the 12 months of the installation in the open air, coming to life as the nearby plants transform around the sculptures. This project is Yu’s first public art commission and her first solo presentation in New York City.

Gabriel Chaile
The wind blows where it wishes, 2023
On view May 2023 through April 2024

Gabriel Chaile (b. 1985, San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina) lives in Lisbon, Portugal. Chaile creates large sculptures, drawings, and installations based on his ongoing research into rituals and popular communal gatherings occurring on the periphery of cities. He uses archetypal materials, forms, and symbols associated with pre-Columbian cultures to create objects and installations that blend Indigenous mythologies and contemporary social themes in a poetic and humorous way. Raised in northern Argentina, with Spanish, Afro-Arabic, and Indigenous Candelaria heritage, Chaile has created a theory he refers to as “the genealogy of form,” which is based on the history of objects that change over time and maintain a genealogical line. Working with bread ovens and large kitchen objects, Chaile is interested in relationships built around food, support, collaboration, and community activities.

The wind blows where it wishes, Chaile’s large adobe sculpture conceived for the High Line at 24th Street, is the result of numerous observations, including Leonardo da Vinci’s nature drawings, Biblical passages about the wind as a transmitter of forces, and representations of natural phenomena in art history: rain, steam, and speed in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, spatial continuity in Umberto Boccioni’s paintings and sculptures, and Hayao Miyazaki’s film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Above all, the artwork is the result of Chaile’s observations of pre-Columbian archeological ceramics from northwest Argentina, gathered in a small museum in Tucumán. The artist imagines these ceramics as ceremonial objects, wind instruments, kitchen containers, planters, and so much more. Chaile wanted to avoid competition with the surrounding skyscrapers and extreme island weather found on the High Line. Instead, he intends for his sculpture to come to life through its interactions with its surrounding natural forces: wind, rain, snow, and vegetation, which will create music when in contact with the sculpture. The artwork is a sculpture-manifesto, one that plays with the wind’s memory as a transmitter of poetry.

Baseera Khan
Painful Arc II (Shoulder-High), 2023
On view June 2023 through May 2024

Baseera Khan (b. Texas) lives in Queens, New York. Baseera Khan’s practice uses the lens of their own body to investigate how desire and surveillance shape subjectivity, including the construction of the artist’s own gender and Muslim identity. Khan assembles references from ancient Middle Eastern cultures found in museums and archaeological archives, abstracting architectural scale and humanizing ostensibly objective collections of art and artifacts. Khan’s large-scale installations are inviting—often incorporating sumptuous colors and radical adornments—and encourage viewers to think about challenging topics such as xenophobia, spirituality, and invisible labor.

For the High Line, Khan installs a monumental archway made of inscribed tablets under The Standard, High Line, near Little West 12th Street. To create Painful Arc II (Shoulder-High), Khan interviewed High Line staff members and photographed the numerous cardboard shipping boxes of supplies that circulate within the complex ecosystem of the park. Khan’s inscriptions on the archway include packaging labels and handwritten notes jotted down by staff members onto incoming shipping boxes. Perforating the sculpture are patterns referencing punctuation symbols from the Quran, drawn with motifs inspired by the park’s flora and fauna. The archway is made from recycled granite and a man-made stone-like composite commonly used for countertops in home kitchens. In their material choices, Khan points to the circulation of materials in the park, and unseen domestic labor largely performed by women. Khan’s reimagined public monument paints a portrait of the park and the people who maintain it every day, as well as the people far away who manufacture the goods shipped to our door globally. While historically archways have been inscribed with the names and symbols of nobles and leaders, this archway is a monument to the ecosystem of often unseen labor and people around the world who make the High Line possible.

“Springtime is such a beautiful time to realize new artworks on the High Line, and this year’s artists offer such meditative perspectives onto our surrounding environment,” said Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art. “Yu Ji, Gabriel Chaile, and Baseera Khan engage with the park’s dynamic different natural and human elements in ways that gently echo and complement each other.”