Imbalance - 2014

In 2014, following her Terracotta Daughters reinterpretation of the famous army of 8,000 terracotta warriors, Prune Nourry created a site-specific installation in a massage parlour in New York's Chinatown. For this she resorted to the material of traditional Chinese medicine, based on the concept of equilibrium between the interconnected meridians through which qi, the body's vital energy, circulates. The aim is to heal holistically, in contrast to allopathy, which focuses mainly on symptoms.

At a solo exhibition in Paris in 2016, in an aquarium-like setting inspired by Chinatown doctors' surgeries, Prune Nourry applied acupuncture needles and glass suction cups to sculptures from the Terracotta Daughters series, to key organs of the human body in bronze, wax, silicone and glass, and to revamped nineteenth-century anatomical plates and models.