Raymond Ren — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Raymond Ren

(Art MFA 25)
https://renray.site/

Tongue Diary; NoClean Space; BuLi Slide 001 (proxy), 2025

Raymond Ren’s work treats the body as a metabolic interface — where internal rhythms, institutional protocols, and inherited forms converge. Across three pieces, he traces how the body is observed, disciplined, and trained — not through representation, but through material systems. In Tongue Diary, the tongue becomes both a physiological record and a cultural signal. Rooted in Chinese medical diagnostics and Māori defiance, Ren’s tongue is read as evidence of internal circulation. Through thousands of photographs taken over two years, the work performs health not as stability, but as a negotiation with time, absence, and the limits of self-surveillance. Attention itself becomes symptomatic.

No-Clean Space suspends institutional cleanliness. A boundary of tape protects accumulating dust, exposing how hygiene disciplines even when framed as care. Dust becomes a residue of inhabitation, pointing to how cleanliness conceals labor, enforces visibility, and suppresses metabolic variation. BuLi Slide 001 (proxy) appears traditional — joinery, polish, symmetry — but functions as risk. It reclaims instability as training. Children learn not by being secured, but by sensing imbalance, shifting weight, sliding into judgment. The work critiques how heritage is often aestheticized into compliance, its ideological force flattened into nostalgia. Here, structure is not for safety, but for sensing. The handmade mockup on-view stands in for a full-scale version held by institutional restrictions. Yet this proxy, in its imperfection, insists on transmission over containment. What appears playful is a proposition: that movement, even when fragile, can still teach.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025