Ruoru Mou: Fortunate

Fortunate is a solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Ruoru Mou, presented as a large-scale installation. For her most ambitious project to date, the artist reappropriates industrial forms, cinematic tropes, bureaucratic residue and manufacturing waste to address the material politics of luxury fashion, circulation, value, and regulatory subjectivity. Working in sculpture and installation, Mou draws on two industries that shaped her upbringing in Tuscany: Chinese restaurants, including one opened by her grandfather, and Chinese-owned leather suppliers for luxury brands, a major source of local employment.

At the centre of the exhibition, the kinetic sculpture Dirty Snow turns the back gallery into an enclosed chamber. In the cooler room, visible but inaccessible, industrial fans propel a blizzard of shredded detritus—residence permits, visas, sanitary certificates, risk assessments, medical booklets and maintenance logs, paperwork once required for care, income and legal personhood in Italy, the UK or the Netherlands. These fragments circulate as bureaucratic weather, mixing industrial residue, administrative waste and sci-fi tropes. Collecting Fees Document (wash label) lists the storm’s composition in percentages, echoing garment tags that promise “purity’” down to arbitrary micro-quantities—0.0000001% soy, 0.001% chromium leather dust. As with “authentic” tags, the breakdown is a fantasy, reflecting contradictions in how labour, authenticity, value and life are classified.

Amid the debris, the monotonous movement of Prosperity, Protection, Purity, a trio of maneki-neko paws, strains through the storm, waving in greeting or farewell. Trapped in their circuit, they address viewers who cannot step inside while themselves unable to step out. The gesture carries persistence and kinship, yet also the demand for sustenance and optimisation placed upon bodies within extractive systems. Who must remain outside, and who is fortunate enough to be caught within?

In the front gallery, vitrines Tease 001, Tease 002 and Tease 003 reference luxury retail displays and Chinese restaurant motifs, reusing ornaments Mou’s grandfather crafted when her family first opened the restaurant. Steel cutting moulds for leather bags encase a marble-like organic material of gelatine, glycerine, restaurant grease and soy sauce—“skins” derived from Mou’s earlier Hung Out to Dry, Holding the Bag (2025–). Pressed into the moulds, the skins push against them, shrinking over time, caught between preservation and decay. In Tease, ornament frustrates utility, doubling as seduction, dressed in fantasy of terror and beauty at once.

This reuse of ‘skin’ is central to Mou’s process: the works form part of her own ‘factory’, where an earlier body (of work) is reprocessed into a new one. The factory here is subject and method, an ongoing cycle of casting, pressing, shrinking, shredding, reshaping and re-valuing that mirrors the rhythms of labour and regulation. Methods of preservation echo the sustaining and exhausting measures required to keep bodies and materials in circulation. Throughout Fortunate, skins—organic, bureaucratic and phantasmic—compound into identifications and protective projections, transforming the body in ways required but not necessarily wanted.

Producing material and optical ambiguity, the exhibition engages the protocols that organise political and economic livelihoods, asking who holds the right to enter and exit, how long it takes to wear a body down, and how one might preserve life. Fortunate works through the ‘impurities’ embedded within systems of production and classification, taking their contingency as its framework.

Curator Adomas Narkevičius.

Ruoru Mou (b. 1997, Florence) is an artist based in London and Amsterdam. Recent group exhibitions include Life After Life, 15th Kaunas Biennial, Kaunas (2025); OFFSPRING 2025, De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2025); Big Fortune, Woonhuis De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2024); Ceremonial Weight, April in Paris, Aerdenhout (2024); On Feeling, The Approach, London (2024); and Cozzie Livs, Des Bains, London (2023). Recent solo exhibitions include Leftover Linings, San Mei Gallery, London (2024). Mou recently completed a two-year residency at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2023–25).

With generous support from Henry Moore Foundation, Cockayne Foundation and The Elephant Trust.