I Will Be Waiting for You on the Other Side is the first presentation by the multimedia artist Ni Daodao in Denmark. For their solo exhibition at the artist-run offspace Captive Portal, Copenhagen, Daodao shows a series of sculptures in the format of Wunder-Baum disposable air fresheners typically used in cars, and shaped and scented after Canadian evergreen trees. Popularized as icons of automobile Americana in the commercial aftermath of World War II, Wunder-Baum fresheners are manufactured in Switzerland not far from the artist’s Uster studio, where they, too, engage in a kind of arboreal and aromatic cultivation. Daodao’s practice is distinguished by their use of urushi, a natural Chinese lacquer produced from strong-smelling tree sap, with roots in ancient China and specifically, the artist’s hometown of Chongqing. Adapting the artistic lineage of urushi to their present European context, through a process of rigorous material exchange, Daodao transforms the prosaic surfaces of their household detritus—Wunder-Baum, cat food packaging and even potato chips—into richly enigmatic artworks.

Filling the Captive Portal space is a ‘forest’ of ninety multicolored Wunder-Baum, installed on a transparent curtain that hangs at the center of the room. The pieces, each a little larger than palm-size, were produced through a lengthy and intricate routine of applying pigmented urushi lacquer to the ready-made trees, allowing it to dry for eight hours in a shaded room, and sanding and washing the residue. This process is repeated by the artist approximately 30 to 50 times before arriving at a finished piece; its arc is relational and intimate, traits that visitors can hone in on at closer look. The gradual assumption of sculptural essence culminates in uniquely textured and stylized artworks, likened by Daodao to their sui generis approach to learning and speaking the languages of their adopted home, and to ‘integrating’ with the West more generally. As a piece evolves, the Wunder-Baum’s cheap chemical scent of commercialized Christmas and picturesque Alpine settings, one that now animates motor vehicles everywhere, exists in tension with the intense charge of the urushi sap, a resistant yet insistent melding where neither scent can wholly supersede or vaporize the other.

This material union of cross-cultural referents—the blood sap of urushi, covering a Western Christian icon—conjures the artist’s larger interests in immigration, global values and locational power structures. Growing up in Chongqing during the economic boom, Daodao was first exposed to Christmas as a consumer initiative for peddling pop ephemera, a perception that seemed to contrast greatly with associations of warm and festive family gatherings promised in the West. Later on, in Europe, they would similarly encounter the holiday’s highly capitalized coding—symbolized by nothing less than the proliferation of the Wunder-Baum. If we were to follow closely, the story of the “little trees” would take us from Germany to Canada to New York and back again, a single journey that becomes many, that becomes ours, too, in Daodao’s gesture of appropriation and tactile invitation (you can touch, feel and compare the original and urushi pieces for yourself in a nearby container). Painting the Wunder-Baum en plein air, through a ritualistic layering of urushi, going over its impression again and again, Daodao enacts a poetics of that which is multiple and nomadic in meaning.