At a time of increasing anxiety about physical anatomy, figurative sculptors are breathing new life into one of the world’s oldest media.

It’s a confusing time to have a body. On the one hand, we have more ways to modify flesh than ever before. We regulate hormones and heartbeats, restore lost hearing, replace faulty livers and reconstruct faces. And yet the body feels increasingly vulnerable. Between deepfakes and the distortions of social media, appearances are subject to scrutiny and doubt. Covid-19 revealed how even slight physical differences can be fatal. Subject to changing laws and environmental crises beyond our control, few of us have much authority over our corporeal selves.

Amid this uncertainty, artists are depicting the body with fresh urgency. “The idea of the body as material and not as something necessarily coherent is something that I see artists taking up in really compelling new ways,” said the curator Lanka Tattersall, who organized the recent exhibition “Vital Signs: Artists and the Body” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In their work, she continued, the body reveals itself as “matter that can be molded and looked at, made pliable and shifted.”

“Did you know the word ‘norm’ came from a carpenter’s tool?” asked the Canadian-born artist Jes Fan, 34, who was raised in Hong Kong and lives in New York City. In his studio, an industrial loft in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, supposedly normal bodies were nowhere in sight. We stood surrounded by cascading piles of partial casts of friends’ torsos, an undulating resin form derived from a CT scan of Fan’s pelvis and a metal armature draped in crinkled folds of yuba, the rubbery skin that forms on the surface of heated soy milk.

In Fan’s work, soy has served as a symbolic androgyne. A source of both pharmaceutical estrogen and testosterone, it reappears in various forms — from solid bean to simmering liquid. A literal and metaphorical fluidity pervades the sculptures: They tend to look as though they’re oozing, dripping, melting and merging. “Everything’s transitory, nothing is stagnant,” he said. That philosophy, more and more, is guiding current approaches to the body.

The artists pursuing figurative sculpture today don’t share a unified strategy, style or concern. They work with plaster, bronze, resin, fabric, motors, glass and clay. They use everyday objects and sometimes more corporeal materials: semen, urine, teeth and hair. Some make legible figures, while others skew toward abstraction, creating works that don’t even resemble bodies in the traditional sense but remain eerily, unmistakably real. What they do have in common is a suspicion of physical perfection. Ideals that suffused Western art for centuries — statuesque proportions, whiteness — are in their hands no more desirable than they are attainable. Young sculptors are poking holes in “the idea of the Cartesian man as the center of the universe,” said the curator Cecilia Alemani, who made physical metamorphosis an organizing principle of the Venice Biennale in 2022. But in the absence of bygone standards emerge bold new freedoms.

Humans have been depicting bodies for thousands of years, but figurative sculpture grows more conspicuous at moments when physical fragility becomes impossible to ignore.

The mechanized slaughter of World War I shredded old notions of decency and valor, and the shattered, burned and blind survivors who emerged from the rubble made a mockery of classical ideals. Cyborg blends of human bodies, machines and mass-produced goods defined Dada and Surrealist art in the years that followed, capturing the trauma of the era but also the thrill of reinvention. Androgyny, queer culture and a new sexual freedom flourished in the wreckage.

Figurative sculpture filled galleries again during the 1980s and ’90s, when the AIDS crisis transformed certain bodies into objects of fear and distaste. The artist Robert Gober responded to the panic over contagion, cleanliness and the seepage between public and private spheres with a series of realistic legs and feet that protruded from walls, usually at floor height, as though the bodies to which they belonged had collapsed. Some sprouted phallic candles, which seemed to suggest a vigil for and of the flesh, while other limbs were penetrated by lesion-like sink drains. At the time, the idea of a universal body had become passé. “There is no ‘human’ body anymore,” the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell wrote in 1995, “there is the gendered body, the desiring body, the racialized body, the medical body, the sculpted body, the techno-body, the body in pain or pleasure.”

Many young sculptors today are continuing to address how bodies are represented in public discourse. Today, however, sensuality and leisure have eclipsed images of abjection and vulnerability. Portraying the body at ease has become a means of dismantling pervasive representations of minorities as victims and villains incapable of rest or everyday intimacy.

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The perils of self-presentation in an age of heightened exposure find keen expression in the seductive, disconcerting sculptures of the American artist Kayode Ojo, 34. To create “Ice Queen” (2020), Ojo sheathed two chairs with chrome-plated legs in matching white sequined dresses. The identical chairs face each other, the dresses linked at the wrists by chains of steel key rings emerging from the sleeves, as though two headless divas were holding hands — or as though a single woman were coldly regarding her own reflection. Swiss Army knives, blades out, dangle in place of fingers.

The various components of “Ice Queen” are balanced on vertical stacks of rectangular plastic boxes — Ojo never fastens, glues or screws together the elements in his sculptures. A sense of precarity haunts the work, “whether it’s economic precarity or social precarity,” said Ojo, who was born in Cookeville, Tenn., and currently lives in New York. “Anything could move at any point.”

Sculpture is audacious in its demands. Painting tends to hang politely on walls; sculpture takes up space. We take representations of the body personally and react with a curiosity, empathy or disgust rarely elicited by abstract cubes or hunks of metal. In our doubles, we recognize our own vulnerability or recall the intrinsic marvels of being inside breathing, sensing bodies in constant flux — works in progress shaped by labor, genes, vanity and, ultimately, time.