Wei Libo Recreates Lost Heirlooms

A whisper-green melon, carved from a block of wood, floats in a tall pool of water in Pure goodness (Bailan melon) (2024), an urn that stands in one corner of Wei Libo’s ‘Furniture and I’ at Frac Île-de-France. The Bailan melon is also called the Lanzhou melon, the name of the town where Wei grew up, and this exhibition reflects on what it means to carry home with you. When Wei moved to Paris four years ago, he found his sweet melons here too – the fruit providing a point of connection to his home, collapsing some of the vast geographic distance between Lanzhou and Paris. This fruit has other names. In France, it is a melon de miel (honeydew melon). Elsewhere, it is known as the Wallace melon, after US Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who – in a 1944 diplomacy trip to Central Asia – carried the seeds to the drought-stricken town of Lanzhou; American ecologists had suggested the melon as an antidote, the fruit growing well in climates prone to drought. In 1949, the Communist Party officially renamed the melon White Lanzhou, in an attempt to reclaim it from the narrative of American intervention. Rather than being benign monikers, the names of fruits are a political project, often the result of diplomatic manoeuvring. The melon in Pure goodness (Bailan melon) is loaded with this history – one that is intimately tied to Wei’s childhood. 

This show is staged as an approximation of Wei’s family home in Lanzhou; we are meant to be standing in its courtyard, with one minimal work – Rafters (2024) – presenting a pair of rounded beams that jut out of the walls, suggesting the building’s gable roof. This home, Wei told me in a conversation about the exhibition, was hand-built by his grandfather, who was an architect and woodworker. He had even hand-carved the roof’s beams, which sometimes carried an odd kink or twist, as they were whittled from tree branches. For Rafters, Wei did the same, using whole branches and leaving their natural curves intact. The Lanzhou home was torn down in the advent of Gansu’s industrial boom, and with it were lost not only its objects but also the knowledge of how they were made. Wei tries to remember by remaking: Pure goodness (Frozen Pear) (2021–24) includes an inlaid dresser made by the artist, with a pattern of interlocking diamonds on its surface. At its centre, amongst the diamonds, stands the image of a tiger – beatific, paws treading a rock. His grandfather had made one just like it. 

On top of this dresser Wei has placed a dark, life-like pear, also carved from a single piece of wood. Known as a ‘frozen pear’, it was Wei’s grandfather’s favourite fruit. In the Autumn months, astringent and sour pears are chosen, washed and placed outdoors to freeze over the winter. Their peels turn from yellow to black. Once thawed to be eaten again, they taste candied and syrupy. Alongside frozen pears and Lanzhou melons, Wei carves apples, watermelons and wide trays of squashed-together mandarins. The fruit in ‘Furniture and I’ serves as an anchor of both personal and political histories, which – together with the various items of wooden furniture on display – articulates the uncanniness of relocation, of how distance can be easily blurred by single details, of how a home travels with you. And, even though they are carved from wood, the fruits retain a sense of their impermanence, their tendency to spoil – just like history itself. 

Wei Libo’s ‘Furniture and I’ is on view at Frac Île-de-France, Paris, until 23 February 

^{Main image: Wei Libo, ‘Furniture and I’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist, Frac Île-de-France, Paris and Sans Titre, Paris; photograph: Martin Argyroglo}