The Finest Legs

About our exhibition

A group of 18th-19th century drawings in dialogue with Joyce Chonghui Wu.

In collaboration with Den Otter Fine Art.

Curated by: Jonathan den Otter and Roxane Ruoxuan Fu

Imagine yourself a young student, training to become a painter, in a 19th century academy.

Long before your name might mark a canvas, your hand had to be earned. The first life drawing sessions were informal, artists gathering in small groups in Renaissance Italy, but by 1563, Giorgio Vasari had made the practice a formal doctrine: you first copied prints, ancient statues, plaster casts, studying anatomy and perspective, and then were brought before a living model. That discipline held for centuries after. It was within this tradition that artists like Cornelis van Noorde (1731–1795), Pieter de Mare (1757–1796), Jules Van Keirsbilck (1833–1896), David Joseph Desvachez (1822–1902), and Herman Frederik Bieling (1887–1964) trained, drawing directly from the models before them.

What the academy could regulate was method, not the eye. Among the plaster casts and antique statues you copy endlessly is the sleeping hermaphrodite, and something of it lingers in your hand. You set out to render strength, broad shoulders, flexed thigh, and it keeps softening at the edges into a grace your century's textbooks would call feminine. Perhaps you are simply drawing what you already believe: that this too is beauty. One sees, at last, what they meant by a fine leg, not a mark of sex, but discipline becomes grace.

And now, as you wake, you are a queer in flesh.

Your legs disappear into loose knee-length shorts. They carry you through marches, or simply through the city with nowhere particular to go. They have learnt to linger in parks, to dance until dawn, to sit cross-legged on studio floors, to miss the last train home. Your calves are no longer the secret slipping beneath a crinoline; they no longer owe anything to desire. They carry no title, no pedigree, no promise of elegance. They carry only the places you have chosen to go.

Legs have carried Joyce Chonghui Wu across countries, languages, and identities. In response to the rhythms of contemporary life, she moves constantly between places, gathering photographs wherever her footsteps arrive. Fragments of fabric, each bearing its own history, are stitched together with thread into new narratives, while geometric blocks echo the industrial pulse of the modern world—the static through which memory, place, and consciousness travel. The body appears only in passing. A calf, a sock, the slight lift of a heel. What remains is a pair of legs.

In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a young Elizabethan nobleman falls asleep and awakens as a woman, living across centuries while remaining essentially the same self. At the beginning, his legs are praised as “the finest legs,” representing the Renaissance ideal of male beauty. After the transformation, that same body is read entirely differently, proof that beauty is shaped as much by perception as by identity.

Woolf writes that “Different though the sexes are, they intermix.” Today, that thought feels more tangible than ever. Placed together, across more than two centuries, the academic life drawings and Wu’s paintings reveal many meanings contained within the finest legs. They hold us upright, carry us forward, and refuse to remain still. They carry us toward whoever we turn out to be.

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