Cured Meat 腊肉

This essay focuses on Chinese contemporary artist Dove’s 2009 sculpture Cured Meat, examining how it reconfigures the relationship between body, faith, and spirituality in the context of contemporary art. Distinct from symbolic or representational uses of religious imagery, Dove embeds the cross within his own flesh, transforming faith from metaphor into ontology. Through both art-historical and theological perspectives, this paper argues that Cured Meat functions as a corporeal confession that reclaims the sacred from the crisis of spiritual entropy in modern art. Tracing Dove’s development from his early paintings filled with countless crosses to his recent geometric abstractions, the essay reveals a consistent spiritual trajectory — a pilgrimage from flesh to light, from sacrifice to renewal.