Post/No/Bills #7 Anatomy of Obstruction

What if an institution had a body? In the seventh edition of Post/No/Bills, artist Kexin Hao transforms the corridor surrounding the Stedelijk’s historic staircase into exactly that: a body.

The recurring series Post/No/Bills showcases new forms of graphic design along the main corridor surrounding the historic staircase of the Stedelijk Museum. Anatomy of Obstruction by Kexin Hao is the seventh edition of the series. Hao has long been drawn to the overlap between organisations and organisms, and between how institutions and bodies function. She begins by hand, creating anatomical drawings and diagrams before scaling them up to fill the niches of the corridor. The sequence opens at the anus, presented as Rebuttal from Within. Whether this functions as the front desk or the back door remains ambiguous. The lungs, titled Air Affairs, form a house of diplomacy that cannot suppress a cough. Acid reflux rises from the stomach as Counter Score of a Mass, while a gallstone stands firmly within the liver’s political Struggle Session. The sequence closes with a kidney stone, the body’s final line of resistance to deportation from Renal Port. Through these bodily obstructions, resistance emerges from within the systems that seek to regulate and contain it. Hao invites visitors to consider what belongs to the body and what is treated as foreign, and how distinctions between health and illness can shape our understanding of the self and the other.

Hao’s research spans a wide range of existing imagery: traditions of anatomical representation, such as eighteenth-century encyclopaedias of natural theology; Daoist body maps once used to guide meditation; and the painted backdrops that governments still use in official meetings to project unity and stability. Different eras, different purposes, yet each image does the same thing: it turns something too vast to grasp directly, whether a body or a nation, into something people can see and trust. Hao borrows this visual language for her own murals, but rather than using it to explain the world, she questions how the systems we create to simplify and organise it also shape power and generate resistance.