A rare double season, Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day at once, answered with a fifteen-foot heart built from cartoon hands and a set of three pigs. Curative secured the deal and produced it across two continents.
If COHERE shows Curative building an object for an artist who owned the room, Xin Tian Di shows the opposite half of the same machine. Here Curative owned the room. One of its relationships opened the door to Xin Tian Di, Shui On Land’s landmark Shanghai district, and Curative brought OG Slick to fill it.
The work Curative did here is the work that does not show up in a photograph. Securing the opportunity. Cross-border business development: the contracts and the payment settlements between a Los Angeles artist, an American production company, and a Chinese property group. Coordinating manufacturing with local vendors for the sculptures and the graphics throughout the mall. Arranging travel for the artist and team so they were on the ground for the unveilings.
Xin Tian Di is not a mall in the ordinary sense. Shui On built it by restoring Shanghai’s shikumen lane houses and threading contemporary retail through them, so a visitor moves between preserved 1920s brick and current-season storefronts in the same block. Work placed there sits in a plaza that happens to sell things.
2019 gave the commission its hook. Chinese New Year opened on February 5 and Valentine’s Day arrived nine days later, so the season carried both the zodiac and the heart. OG Slick answered in two registers at once.
“Love Gloves” is a monumental heart, roughly fifteen feet tall, built from two of OG Slick’s oversized cartoon hands meeting at the fingertips, white with a soft pink interior and his signature paint splatter. Visitors walked into the open heart and were photographed framed by it. Fabricated in FRP for a short-term run.
“3 Little Pigs” is the zodiac register, a set of three sculptural pigs at varying heights. A “POP” mall takeover carried the artist’s world through the district in applied graphics, hanging elements, and posters. This was the second year of the franchise: the year before, for the Year of the Dog, the district turned over to David Flores and his five-meter Tomodachi.
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