Ruoru Mou, Hung out to dry, left holding the bag, 2025-26. Gelatine, restaurant grease, glucose, cornstarch, soy sauce, purlins, aluminium, variable dimensions.
Ruoru Mou, Tease 002, 2025. Steel leather cutting moulds, gelatine, glycerin, restaurant grease, corn starch, soy sauce, woodcarving fragments, glass, Perspex, beechwood, veneer, LED strips, braided fabric cable, 89 x 118 x 17 cm,
Ruoru Mou, Tease 001, 2025. Steel leather cutting moulds, gelatine, glycerin, restaurant grease, corn starch, soy sauce, woodcarving fragments, glass, Perspex, beechwood, veneer, LED strips, braided fabric cable, 190 x 89 x 17 cm.
Ruoru Mou: %
Liebaert Projects, 2026“%” was a solo exhibition by artist Ruoru Mou at Liebaert Projects, a private foundation in Kortrijk, Belgium. Bridging personal and structural histories, the artist considers how forms of making metabolise inherited economies and how waste and by-products can be reworked into new configurations of property, authorship, agency, and desire.
The works in the exhibition, shown together for the first time, entered in dialogue with the site of the former weaving mill De Stoop. Mou’s materials shifted continuously across the exhibition, shrinking and sweating as the season turns, interrogating oppositions between production and consumption, factory and shop, waste and commodity.
Ruoru Mou grew up in Tuscany, Italy, in a region marked by a high density of Chinese-owned leather goods suppliers to luxury brands. In her work, Mou blends stereotyped Chinese restaurant motifs with organic materials, bureaucratic residue and industrial forms to question how we assign value and navigate excess. The artist is interested in the notion of excess as defined by French intellectual Georges Bataille, who in The Accursed Share (1949) argues that society is driven not by utility but by waste, producing economies that are ‘excessive’: luxury, eroticism, art.
Ruoru Mou’s ‘skins’, used as sheets in the installation Hung out to dry, left holding the bag (2025–26) and later cut and pressed into the metal bag moulds in Tease (2025), are made using a mixture of gastronomic and industrial waste including gelatine, glucose, glycerine, soy sauce and grease. The unstable chemistry of the faux leather, prone to sweating and separating under heat, mimics rawhide in its curing process. Each suspended sheet is marked with two inscriptions: the artist’s grandfather’s seals in the Chinese seal tradition (yìnzhāng), where authorship is cumulative and shared, and factory-style codes appropriated from ‘Céline’ product numbers. The artist recasts the opposition between originality and copy that influences the global perception of ‘Oriental knockoffs,’ setting it against the branding logic of luxury fashion and the contemporary demand for individuality and authenticity.
Through the artist’s culinary and alchemic processing, the clichés of Chinese restaurants and the economies of leather workshops in Tuscany overlap. These industries are sustained by migrant networks, providing entry and protection to workers while also reproducing cycles of exploitation. Hung out to dry, left holding the bag intends to question our relationship to value, excess and what is counted as legitimate or illegitimate work.
Vitrine works Tease 001, Tease 002 and Tease 003 (2025) reference both luxury retail displays and Chinese restaurant garden motifs, reusing the wooden ornaments the artist’s grandfather crafted when her family first opened a restaurant in Italy. Here, the bags that would usually be displayed behind shop windows are replaced by tools: leather cutting moulds sourced from LVMH headquarters and handled by migrant workers.
The moulds bear markings of authentication, authorship, and control – though they are often re-used for bootlegging luxury bags after being overhauled by new designs and discarded. Encased within them is an organic, marble-like material derived from the sheets of Hung out to dry, left holding the bag. The skins glow seductively inside the moulds, producing frictions between preservation and decay, ornament and utility, luxury and waste.
Liebaert Projects is located in the former flax weaving mill De Stoop, a family business built on the trade and processing of flax. To make linen, the flax plant undergoes retting, a process of controlled decay that triggers a microbial reaction, coaxing it to release its fibre. This capacity for transformation, and the production of a material and metabolic surplus connects to Mou's artistic practice. The cycles of casting, curing, shrinking, tearing, reshaping and revaluing are contingent on the humidity and atmosphere of where the works are made and shown.
The title of the exhibition is both an image and a sign. Two circles separated by a diagonal line. A percentage is always in opposition; each number stands in a codependent relation to another. The numbers tell us about the materials that make up a garment, where one might pay attention to the ratio of natural and synthetic. They inform about the ingredients in a grocery item, which substances will be processed and transformed by the body. A percentage sign feigns transparency in a world that is intentionally opaque about how, where and by who a product was made.
Ruoru Mou (1997, Florence) lives and works between London and Amsterdam. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Fortunate at Cell Project Space, London; Life After Life, 15th Kaunas Biennial, Kaunas; OFFSPRING De Ateliers, Amsterdam; Big Fortune, Woonhuis De Ateliers, Amsterdam; Ceremonial Weight, April in Paris, Aerdenhout; On Feeling, The Approach, London and Leftover Linings at San Mei Gallery, London.
Download the exhibition guide here.