Alex Müller | Blunt Society Shanghai

 Alex Müller: Solidified Notes, by Ni Youyu

“The first time I encountered Müller’s work was during a trip to Berlin. In an unassuming corner of a friend’s gallery, I came across a small piece entitled The Tenderness of the Everyday 4. The artist had collected colorful fragments of soap that were about to be used up in daily life, washed them again by hand, and neatly inserted them into a hand-sewn fabric pouch. I was immediately moved by it. It is difficult to find words to describe that moment, as if a melody of music had entered my retina.

For an artist to be drawn to another artist’s work, sometimes all it takes is such an instant, without the need for language. Soap, as the most ordinary cleansing product in our childhood memories—before the popularization of shower gels and liquid soaps—carries a deep familiarity. I know that many Germans still retain the habit of using soap today. People tend to use it until the very end, leaving behind thin slivers as short as the stub of a pencil that can no longer be sharpened. Over a decade ago, I also used soap in my own work Guanyin. I understand that soap, as an artistic material, inevitably embodies an implicit relationship with the body. Through daily use, soap is polished against the body, leaving behind its negative form. Yet, when I closely observed those small fragments of soap that Müller had personally washed, shaped, and carefully arranged, I was overcome by the illusion that they were not soap at all. Their refined and intricate textures, colors, and shapes resembled stone tools from the Paleolithic age—axes, adzes, and arrowheads—or ancient jade pieces from China’s pre-Qin period. I knew Müller had never been to China before, and I wondered whether, as she arranged these delicate fragments, she harbored an unconscious imagination of the distant ancient East.

Having said so much, I am very pleased to curate Müller’s first solo exhibition in China at Blunt Society, and to formally introduce this German artist to Chinese audiences. Alex Müller was born in 1969 in Düren, North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built, Müller’s father, then seventeen years old, crossed to the other side without saying a word to his family. Her grandmother never forgave him for it. As a “defector”, he was forbidden from entering East Germany for over a decade. To meet his family, they sometimes had to take a detour through Prague; at other times, he would return to the western side of the border, where observation platforms allowed people to wave across the Wall to their loved ones. In that era, nearly every German had relatives or friends on the opposite side. In Müller’s memory, from 1971—when she was only two and a half years old—until 1983, her parents would send her alone across the Cold War border each summer to visit her grandmother in Berlin’s Wilhelmsruh district. Sometimes, she would fly as an “unaccompanied minor” with British Airways to West Berlin, where her aunt would collect her and hand her over to East German border policewomen at the checkpoint on the Bornholmer Straße bridge, a now-famous Cold War symbol.

A young girl traveling alone across the severe frontier of the Cold War—perhaps it was this unique childhood experience that shaped Müller’s heightened sensitivity. What is remarkable is that her sensitivity is not fragile. The environment in which she grew up did not leave a mark of “coldness” upon her or her later works. On the contrary, it instilled in her art a sense of resilience and tenderness, allowing emotional warmth to quietly emanate from within a distinctly German restraint.

The Amends Angel (2024) is one such work filled with warmth. Müller’s father passed away from cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving behind an old leather jacket. The artist covered its surface with stamps from the former East Germany, as a tribute to her father who had once fled East Berlin without farewell. In the years that followed, letters bearing those stamps became the only emotional connection sustaining the fractured family. Although East and West German stamps reflected entirely different ideological aesthetics, to family members separated by the Wall, these stamps—capable of carrying letters across the divide—were nothing short of angels.

For this exhibition, Müller sent us three “letterboxes” from Berlin, each reflecting a “station” in her life. Huchem-Stammeln represents her first stop, the place of her upbringing, while Neukölln and Mellenau correspond to her two current places of residence (Neukölln being a district in Berlin, and Mellenau about an hour and a half north of the city). These places serve as metaphors for “home.” Interestingly, Blunt Society is located in a 1930s residential building in Xinkang Garden, Shanghai. Müller’s three letterboxes have been installed respectively in the original stairwell, bathroom, and bedroom of what was once a family residence. When planning the spatial relationship between the works and the exhibition site, I was initially concerned that situating an artwork in our bathroom exhibition area might be inconvenient for the artist, as not every artist is willing to have their work displayed in such a setting. To our surprise, Müller not only accepted it but created an additional sculpture titled For the Morning and the Evening, a white ceramic “sink” with rich tactile presence, evoking associations with the body. Later I learned that bathrooms hold deep personal significance for Müller. She said, “The bathroom has always been my place. When I was living at home, or when I stayed with my grandmother in East Germany, the bathroom was always where I would rest. Even when I did not need to go to the toilet, I would sit on it.” The bathroom offered young Müller a completely private space of solitude, a sanctuary that distanced her from the endless discussions around the Berlin Wall, German division, and the meaning of freedom. For each of us living today, does the bathroom not hold a similar meaning?

Unlike her conceptual and structurally controlled installations, Müller’s paintings retain a childlike spontaneity that is rare and precious. I imagine that the little girl once traversing the two sides of the Berlin Wall may have painted in this same way from an early age and never stopped. This naive quality in her paintings reminds me of the way folk art once inspired Matisse, standing in sharp contrast to the academic painting traditions of China. In addition to conventional materials such as acrylic and canvas, Müller also experiments with Pelikan ink, espresso, cotton, satin, and velvet. She allows the liquid pigments to form wrinkles upon the fabric, resembling the texture of skin. As a painter myself, I can easily picture her sipping coffee while freely spreading it across the canvas.

Müller’s first exhibition in China is titled I Was at Home. Unlike a literal translation of the English title, I chose the Chinese title “起居” (Daily Life). It recalls a work I once copied, Methods of the Immortals for Daily Life by the Five Dynasties calligrapher Yang Ningshi, which records a brief passage on health cultivation through massage and the regulation of vital energy in everyday life. Müller’s own “method of daily living,” in turn, is to move through the weight of history with lightness and grace. I think again of the emotion I felt when I first saw her The Tenderness of the Everyday: those neatly arranged fragments of soap were her vocabulary of daily life, the solidified notes of her everyday existence. “Everyday life” is often as plain as a glass of water, much like the monotonous repetition of Müller’s video in which she washes soap by hand. To most people, such repetition may appear tedious, but I imagine that Müller must have been humming a tune at the time.”

The exhibition will be presented with the presentation “Ma Lingli: Lane 1273“ which is taking place at the same time.

Ma Lingli: Lane 1273 & Alex Müller: I Was at Home | 2025.11.10 – 2026.1.11 

BluntSociety, 2F, No.14, XinKang Garden, 1273 Huaihai Middle Rd, Shanghai