These Two Artists Work in Clay and Music. Nothing About It Is Sweet — and It's Great | 100 People With Ideas

They study the dark, chaotic state that existed before culture arrived — and, beyond that, the human subconscious.

Children are usually thought of as pure and helpless, and the fairy tales and other things adults make for them tend to build bright, warm worlds — a last coat of kindness and courage painted on before a child walks into the mad adult world.

The fairy-tale scenes the Swedish artists Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg paint are unlikely to turn up on any parent's reading list. In a claymation-and-installation piece called Secret Garden, a rabbit in rumpled clothes is high on drugs — eyes unfocused, rims red, whiskers curling — and gets flung into the air like a puppet on strings before landing on a sofa cushion. Clay pills, flowers, acorns and bells lie scattered in front of the screen, as if a wild party had just ended.

The piece is on show in "Secret Garden: Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg," a two-person exhibition mounted jointly by the Twenty First Century Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai and Britain's Lisson Gallery. It is the pair's first exhibition in Asia and holds six groups of works. It opened on September 10 and runs through October 23.

Nathalie and Hans are both 38 this year. They lived and worked in Berlin for a long stretch and recently moved back to Sweden. Nathalie handles the visual side — animation, sculpture — and since 2001 her claymation has grown into a style unmistakably her own, staging the meanest parts of human nature: envy, revenge, greed, desire running loose. Hans, her partner, is a composer who uses electronic music to build a detached, grotesque, immersive experience.

The two started working as a duo in 2003. They met in Berlin. "A friend suggested we should collaborate — she basically forced Nathalie to send me one of her videos, though at first she was reluctant... I loved the video, I'd never seen anything like it, and I was afraid that scoring it would ruin it," Hans said in an interview. What he did not expect was that Nathalie would love the score when she got it, saying it "turned the video into something else entirely."

In 2009 they represented the Swedish Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale and began to make their name in the international art world.

Claymation was invented in the early 20th century, and by the 1920s cel animation had quickly replaced it and pushed it out of the mainstream. Say "claymation" and the images that come to mind are probably Shaun the Sheep, Chicken Run or Mary and Max — characters with smooth skin and big, innocent eyes, in stories that are warm and moving.

Disney is the master of that way of telling a fairy tale, and the curator, Sun Qidong, set Disney against Nathalie and Hans on purpose. "Shanghai Disneyland had just opened, and we wanted to take a position," he said. "Disney gives its audience joy, brightness and a warm ending — the environment mainstream culture imagines for 'children.' The work of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg points instead at the dark, chaotic state that existed before culture arrived, and beyond that at the human subconscious, the biological code left in us by survival and evolution," he wrote in the preface.

The clay figures in Nathalie's hands keep the marks of the hand on purpose: rough, unfinished. Figures like these carry a different feeling, a raw force and appetite from before civilization tamed us. After all, by Neil Postman's account, the idea of childhood only began after printing arrived and reading divided people into groups; it does not have a long history. Before that, the folk tales people passed along by mouth were not meant for children alone, and violence, coarseness and cruelty in them surprised no one — you can catch a glimpse of this in Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales, which gathers stories from around the world.

In Tiger Licking Girl's Butt (2004), one of Nathalie's early signature works, a tiger smacks its lips and licks a naked girl's backside over and over; the girl shifts from resisting and warning to yielding and egging it on, and the coarse clay makes the violence and the sex hit harder.

Clay and mud are what God used to make people, and also one of the toys children love most. Nathalie says she chose clay because it lets her take complete control — "it's not about a smooth surface." In a 2014 interview she said other forms of expression did not suit her: she was not skilled at drawing, sculpture or the computer, and her early years at art school left her lost. She recalled, "I really didn't feel anything about what I was doing anymore, and I was very afraid. I felt trapped inside a very heavy structure. I thought artists were supposed to be free, but I no longer felt free, and I even wanted to stop working altogether..."

In recent years they have stopped making claymation with a story line, and their work has turned in a more abstract direction. Nathalie's own favorite piece in "Secret Garden" is a set of four white tables with half-melted ice creams stuck into them upside down, while bubbles projected on the tabletops keep flowing, merging and splitting, scattering and changing as if trapped there. She made this piece, Fever Dreams (2014), from the hallucinations she saw while running a fever, recording a dream state that is hot and steaming, like a caged animal.

At the end of the exhibition, visitors step into The Black Pot (2013). Everything around them is pitch black, a huge screen stands in front of them, solid matter has vanished, and only bubbles shift and flow — like God making the world: a little water, a little cell, a little light.

This week QDaily talked with Nathalie and Hans about their work.

Q: QDaily

N: Nathalie

H: Hans

1. This exhibition has a strong dark, sticky texture. When we say "claymation," the first impression is probably a warm, happy story. Why did you choose clay as your material? How do you see the contradiction between your work and what mainstream society thinks claymation is?

N: I like that contradiction. When you watch animation, you automatically assume it is for children and not for adults, and I think that is a powerful thing, because it means you drop your guard while you watch, without expecting to be frightened or moved in any particular way. Animation as a medium, like storytelling, is for children and adults alike. I don't care about a smooth surface — or sometimes I do care, but I'm too careless or too impatient to make it smoother and more perfect. This is artistic animation, not animation for a commercial mass audience. The concept matters far more than a smooth surface. It isn't there to please people; it means something else.

2. Flowing water and bubbles show up often in your work. Why are you especially interested in these elements?

N: Because they are changing, not fixed. It reminds me that things pass in an instant and there is no need to hold tightly to anything, because everything is changing. It is also emotional, closely tied to the body — like tears and urine.

3. Animals, nature and childhood are usually painted as sweet and pure, but your work shows more of the dark side of these subjects. Was your own childhood happy? What drives you to dig into the raw force of human nature?

N: I think very few people have a perfect childhood; that is impossible. You can have a pretty good childhood, but it can't be perfect. That may even be lucky, because growth and depth do not come from comfort. It depends on how you understand it yourself: you go through something terrifying or traumatic, and another person, stronger or of a different temperament, might not be affected by it at all.

H: I grew up in the Swedish countryside, surrounded by forest. Nature does not always feel sunny, comfortable and sweet; along with its beauty it is also frightening, deep and mysterious. So my drive comes from digging deep — not throwing away the parts I don't like, but taking everything in.

4. Your work has turned toward abstraction in the past few years. How did that change happen?

N: The change has gone back and forth. For a while we were very interested in what music is and what music can do, with no clear story line. But now I'm back to making animation with a story. We moved back to Hans's old home in Sweden, a village between a lake and a forest. Coming to a place that quiet, that open, that natural made me almost dizzy, and the more abstract animation came out of that.

5. Where do you get your inspiration?

H: Anything — anything we live through, think about, dream, or carry in our heads. Something becomes inspiration because it touches or strikes something. For me, inspiration comes from collision, from which a question or a push comes out. That is also why the collaboration is so rewarding, with me making music and Nathalie making visual art: that kind of collision gives us a lot of inspiration.

Images courtesy of: Lisson Gallery, contemporaryartdaily.com