Hu Xiaoyuan and Ma Qiusha are attending the La County Museum of Art's "The Charm of Things: Contemporary Chinese Material Art." Curated by Wu hung and Orianna Cacchione, the exhibition opened with a preview on May 30 and opens to the public on June 2. It concentrates on the Chinese contemporary art works of the past 40 years, in which the conscious choice of materials has become a symbol of the artist's expression, representing the unique trend of this period of modern history. The show will start at LACMA and travel to the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, the Seattle Gallery and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts.

In her works, Hu Xiaoyuan has always shown her interest in exploring the relationship between opposites and interchanges of things. Her works relate to her subtle experience of everyday things, and she separates herself from the dialectics of meaning and concept to think about the relationship between "object and form" in an abstract way. The installation, "Ant Bone No.4" is the latest extension of her "Wood" series, which began in 2008 and is the biggest attempt yet. The artist cuts and polishes waste beams, unidentified wood that has been repeatedly cut, and columns that have been disassembled into new structures by stitching them together or combining them with metal. The delicate light silk is wrapped around a bulky wood structure, while the artist has traced the wood grain on the silk surface with fine strokes of pen and ink, with tension between the materials.

The work Walderland-Black Side (2016) presented by artist Ma Qiusha in the exhibition is from the Smart Museum collection of the University of Chicago. "Wadran" is the name of a giant playground that was never completed in the 1990s on the outskirts of Beijing, and the artist started work on a series of works of the same name in 2015. She wrapped pieces of broken concrete in stockings of different lengths, thicknesses and shades, and then put them back into their original shape. The breakage of silk stockings during wearing and the holes in the wrapping of cement slabs were carefully filled in by the artist with clear nail polish. Silk stockings are the artists' deep childhood memories of mothers and women. The changes of color and texture of silk stockings and their roles in women's daily wear reflect the cultural and political changes of times.