Dust is Dust
This work was developed from my previous work about "ignore". After I finished it, I felt that the word "ignore" covers a wide range, so I wanted to find a more specific point about "ignore". The reason for using "dust" as the entry point is a saying from the TV series "Sherlock", That is "dust is eloquent", which inspired me. It means you can put back anything but dust. Therefore, I started to follow the trail of dust around the house, like in the TV series, hoping to find some interesting clues. At the same time, I began to search for other artists who made art about dust, and I found that many people had made different interpretations of dust. However, I didn't find any interesting information in the dust in my room. After summarizing all my research, the conclusion was reminded me of one word, over-interpretation. It does not mean that other people's art of dust is over-interpreted, but the process reminds me of something that has been over-interpreted. So, I still use dust as a carrier and try to interact with the audience with a joke. I collected a certain amount of dust from my home, divided it up into several A5 files, made up five different sources for them, and made up simple descriptions for each source. Finally, a tag on the bottom file bag tells the audience that the above description is fake. In this way, the audience can experience their own over-interpretation.
Do You Remember?
In the context of the information explosion, our attention is always attracted by some information only for the purpose of attracting attention, and we ignore something more meaningful. And what I want to say is, "please pay attention to your attention."
In order to properly express this sentence in a work, I need to find a start point, and I expect you to bring yourself into it. I found the start point when I saw Kusama Yayoi’s work “Narcissus Garden”. when I squatted in front of a lot of reflective stainless steel balls, these stainless steel balls are reflected in several aspects of myself, I think these points can be something of my own, I finally chose some the photos or screenshots of a web site or recipes in my mobile phone photo album. I once felt these photos very useful, I took these pictures down as references, now I forget the photos. After that, I used acrylic sheets, acetate sheets, and black spray paint, and transformed these images into an abstract form. In this installation, the element of abstract, “on the ground”, transparent, actually express a vague, forgotten state, and I even hope that the audience can accidentally step on them. When they realize they accidentally step on something, their neglect just emphasizes the state of forgetfulness I mentioned earlier.
How Many T-shirts Will I Have in My Life?
This work is another one of my works about interpretation. If "dust is dust" means an object interpreted from the inside, then this work means that I interpret various information from the outside world to define myself. It was inspired by the comments others have made about me on my social media, and their comments make me feel that sometimes I have a different image in the eyes of my different friends. And my subjective perspective doesn't seem to allow me to look at myself objectively. Thus, I would be curious about how I would interpret my identity (in my opinion, the definition of whom you are as a person after interacting with you is an identity).
From there, I tried to interview people, like friends, family, myself, and strangers, about their impressions of me, and some things related to those impressions. On the other hand, some of the books and artists I have researched on this topic have led me to the conclusion that they either show their own living environment, children, friends, or observe or even investigate others' life experiences and health conditions. And my interviews with other people reflected that, so I tried to use the information they gave me to remodel myself through the T-shirt.
The reason I drew the content of my conversation with them on the plain white T-shirt is that I was inspired by Sophie Calle's work "The Tie", a brown Tie with blue characters, which is an autobiographical story. And I also think the tie itself gives the story a good context, so I decided to try to express my idea in a similar way. The white T-shirt doesn’t have unnecessary decoration. It is also like the identity of a person, which is the decoration of a person outside the body. In addition, on either side of these t-shirts are a dirty clothes basket and a blank T-shirt, representing the past and the future.
The Feedback
This work is feedback to my previous work "How many T-shirt I will have in my life", they are a series of works, they are all exploring "identity". In my last work, I interviewed many people about some of my questions, and draw what they told me on the T-shirt, no matter what they said. But in fact, what these interviewees say sometimes makes me want to refute them and tell them that there is another version of their story. When doing the work "How many T-shirt I will have in my life?", I think the one-sided story is also the significance of this work. What I need is not a perfect, so-called right answer. However, I made this work because Georges Perec's book "Life: A user ’s manual" inspired me, and it gave me a direction to extend this work. In his book, he tells the stories of people living in a building in the order of floors. These stories are related to each other like a net. I can sometimes be in the story of a person Find another version of the story of another person. And for me, the story told by those interviewed also has another version. So I decided to draw my version of the story. In this way, the two works in this series can be regarded as a whole, a more complete interpretation of "identity", or two works, respectively, thinking about "identity" from the outside world and the inside world.
Florence Day Trip
This is just a work of self-entertainment, but I like it very much. This summer, I traveled to Italy. This work comes from the regrets in this journey. The day after my friend and I arrived in Florence, I was sick, so I had to stay in an Airbnb flat. When I felt better, I also felt so bored, so I started taking pictures in Airbnb flat aimlessly. But when I went back London and forth to see all the photos in Italy, I felt as if the Airbnb flat is also one of the sightseeing places, because photos were mixed with other photos, although they are not the usual sightseeing place. ThenI picked out these photos and divided them into three groups, titled living room, bedroom, bathroom, and each room was regarded as a sightseeing place in my journey.
The Key of Office
This work is based on a specific theme, "Immurment", and a specific site, The Crypt Gallery. I choose "Key" as the theme of my work because I feel that when people are imprisoned by some visible or invisible things, they will want to find a key to solve their dilemma. And my recent works are focus on an everyday object, telling stories in different ways to explain what the everyday object is. So I focused on the key and tried to find any story about the word "key" from different channels. I think man-made objects are related to people, and classifying the people I am related to and then collecting stories can explain a relatively complete article. Therefore, in the final work, I divided all the collected stories into five categories, which come from myself, the news, strangers, people I know, fairy tales. In some of these stories, the key means a turning point or a person. In other stories, the key is just the physical key, for example, the key in the home where the news was located, and the last story from a fairy tale. The key found by the little boy in the snow. In addition, in the process of making works, I also referenced some works by Stephen Willats. Because in his work, I will feel that he will give a very systematic structure to the information to be conveyed in his work. It looks like a diagram and sometimes contains some symbols. Especially like his work, "Living With Practical Realities", he tells the story of an elderly lady living alone in a high-rise building in a form similar to a chart. In my work, when I need to represent multiple people's stories on one painting at the same time, I borrowed his method because I think it is a simple and effective way of telling stories, which is different from the ordinary narrative.
I have also tried some materials about the work, because our site is located on the ground and is very humid, so painting on paper will have certain risks. In the end, I chose to paint on translucent Polypropylene sheets, so that this material will not be affected by the site, and secondly, when light passes through it, it can form a light and shadow effect.
Lost and Found
This is one of the works in my "everyday object" project, I try to interpret "letter" in this work. But it does not interpret all the letters, but the letters of former tenants lived in my flat. Receiving this type of letter may be a frequent occurrence here, but it is very new to me. Because when I lived in China before, I had never encountered such a situation. We hardly used a post box and received a few physical letters. So when I saw these letters, I suddenly felt that this was the story I needed! Because of the works in this project, the method of collecting stories is important. For example, for the work "the key office", the method of collecting stories is to collect the stories of different kinds of people. For this work, it is only to obtain the stories from the limited information of the letters in my mailbox. However, after the story, I received another gift to my former resident. This was no longer just a greeting card or coupon, so I wanted to return it, but the sender's address was accidentally soiled. Then I thought I could combine the information I got from these letters with my imagination into a story. On the one hand, if the stories are fortunately seen by former residents, they may know that their gifts are with me. On the other hand, these stories are also an interpretation of the theme.
Boring
Amusement Park
This is a work specially made for a workshop, whose theme is loneliness and solitudes. For the topic of loneliness, I think I will pay attention to the loneliness and solitude of introverts, because I am also an introvert. Introverts always look like a group of lonely people. On the one hand, they often actively want to be alone, because being alone is their way to recharge their energy. On the other hand, they are passively alone because they are ignored. I don't mean to be ignored when everyone is talking. Instead, many people treat introversion as a weakness, so that many of the rules in society are designed for extroverts, such as the way that the work environment is set up, the way children are educated, and so on. Thus, I thought why not design a set of rules for introverts.
Then I started searching for introverts. Although I am an introverted person, I hope to get more objective information. Then I took the information I had collected and put it into my amusement park, and the park had its rules. Of course, this amusement park is not a place to escape reality, but to tell people, please pay attention to the rules of our world.
The work has two forms of presentation, one is these digital paintings itself, which focuses on the content of the story, and the other is presented in the form of a poster and tickets. The reason I did this is that if it's just some digital paintings, then this amusement park is just a world that I imagined, but it's become more realistic while making it into a poster and show it.
“ELF” Series
About this series of works, actually I am not sure whether they are a series of formal works, or just drafts, daily notes? These drawings are my observations of mundane objects and turn them into elves. I did this because I’m strongly influenced by the ghost culture in China and Japan. On the one hand, I think most of these monsters, ghosts, elves, and spirits are transfer from animals, plants, or other things in nature, but very few of them are transfer from an object. So I imagined these little monsters based on my interest in mundane objects. On the other hand, I also draw on the works I have seen about Chinese and Japanese spirits, such as “SouShenJi”, “Requiem from the Darkness”, and “Natsume’s Book of Friends”, in which the concept of obsession, or the similar concept that human beings' thoughts can help to form spirits, explains my drawings.
Untitled
At the beginning of the work, I still want to collect a certain type of second-hand mundane object from others, and then find their stories and explain them. However, due to lockdown, and b I will leave the UK in the next few months, I began to focus on my second-hand objects, which I mean I could transfer to someone else.
At the same time, I began to have some interest in cognition science because of my previous works. I read some books about cognition science by Steven Pinker, such as " The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language" and "How the mind works" and interested in how we perceive an object. Thus, I started thinking about how can I use my second-hand stuff to elicit what I’m interested in? First, how do you get these items to the audience? What I came up with was, like an advent calendar, to put each item into a box with a picture of the contents of the boxes, and the picture on the box was my observation of these items. The viewer chooses a box based on the picture on the box and then break the drawing, then takes away the contents. However, I have a rule that after the audience takes out an object, they need to put anything of their own into the box. It is a kind of less direct communication with the audience. In my mind, the information that can be expressed through language is sometimes limited, while the non-language elements can make people feel the connection between the two.
And then I received some inspiration from Steven Pinker's book about visual perception, reasoning, emotion, social relations, to refine the rest of my work. I will draw some stories by combining the pictures on the box with the objects left by the audience. The process of the audience choosing the box is like the audience using visual perception to recognize something, while my story is that I use my ability to reason and image to perceive something. After completing these two steps, I may also use other elements related to cognition to keep these stories going, so this is an unfinished work.