Two grand snakes fight for a giant butterfly’s wings

In Wu's paper-cut works, as described by Professor Haun Saussy in a catalog essay for the artist, a simple outline “turns out to be immensely complex. The one body is now teeming with smaller bodies that are themselves teeming with smaller bodies. The bodies at their various levels peer at us with countless eyes or go about their business, ignoring us...Thus Wu Jian’an’s decision to bring the nonmetropolitan, the eccentric, the exiled, the monstrous into the constitution of his colossal figures opens their bodies’ interior onto the widest cultural outside and makes it impossible to say that his art represents ‘a throwback to Chinese tradition’; it’s at the very least much more than that.”