A Walk with Blaze
2019 - 2021HD metal prints, adhesive vinyl, aluminium sheet, spray paint, ink, stone, mixed media
In the summer of 2019, I hiked at Harriman-Bear Mountain State Park in New York with a group of people. Repeatedly walking by unknown markers with different patterns, forms and colors, I started to stop and get closer to observe them. Some markers were painted on the stones, some were nailed on the trees as a piece of metal. Some places were densely populated with them, some were spread out. Somewhere around a lake we finally got a chance to have a rest. I went back onto the trail and started to reengage with those markers in different ways: I ran past them at different speeds, recording the sound of my breathing and fleeting footsteps and the sound of the wind, made by me or nature itself--I could not really distinguish. Some days after I finally figured out they were called trail markers. That memory of my running past the markers had been circling around my mind for months, until I moved to a place in the middle of nowhere during the pandemic, and I had the opportunity to engage with them in a deeper way. At first I made arrow-shaped trail markers with paper, let them lie on the road, drift in the river and placed them on rocks and trees. Later on, I became a volunteer at New York New Jersey Trail Conference where I maintained Yellow Trail at Garret Mountain Reservation in New Jersey, nailing trail markers into the trees with hammers, cutting branches which blocked the trail with clips.
Guided by my practice of drifting and encounters with trail markers, I became interested in how the sign of a trail marker guides me to open up a new world of signs and language, both physically and virtually, across urban and natural spaces. Influenced by the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, I am also interested in creating interventions in different environments involved with my practice of aimless wanderings with/without prop and prompts.
“What does this part of landscape in New York and New Jersey mean to me?”, is also a question I am thinking about in this project. I like the story of an American man getting lost when he was exploring London because of the foggy weather, and he founded the Boy Scouts after he came back to the United States. I often think about how in Beijing several years ago, patients felt very confused about where they needed to go to see the doctor in a hospital because of less-considered spatial design, misguided signs, and markers in the interior space. Trail markers as a kind of both intervention and caretaking is something I would also like to construct in my homeland. Intrigued by the tension among form, color and sound in this project, I am thinking about a trail with directional markers as a metaphor of the psycholinguistic structure of “entry-body-exit” in our daily life.
和树号的一次行走
2019-2021, 尺寸可变
铝板热升华转印、自粘乙烯基贴纸、铝片、喷漆、墨水、石块、交通障碍杆
2019年夏天，我与一行人前往纽约州的哈里曼-熊山州立公园（Harriman-Bear Mountain State Park）徒步。途中，我不断经过一些图案、形态和色彩各异的标记，便停下脚步，凑近观察。有的标记直接画在石头上，有的则是钉在树干上的金属片；有的地方标记密集，有的则分布得较为稀疏。在湖边稍作休息后，我回到步道上，开始以不同的方式与这些标记互动：我以各种速度从它们身旁跑过，同时记录下自己的呼吸声、转瞬即逝的脚步声，以及风声——这些声音究竟源于我自身还是自然界，已难以分辨。后来我才知道，这些东西被称为“步道标记”（trail markers）。那段从标记旁飞奔而过的记忆，在我脑海中萦绕了数月。直到疫情期间，我搬到了一个偏僻之地，才有了更深入探索这些标记的机会。起初，我用纸制作了箭头状的标记，将它们散落在路面、漂浮于河中，或是放置在岩石与树木之上。后来，我成为了“纽约-新泽西步道协会”（New York-New Jersey Trail Conference）的一名志愿者，负责维护新泽西州加勒特山保护区（Garret Mountain Reservation）内的“黄色步道”——我用锤子将步道标记钉在树上，并用修枝剪清理掉阻碍步道的枝条。
在“漫游”实践与步道标记的邂逅中，我开始思考：这些步道标记如何引导我开启一个全新的符号与语言世界——无论是在物理空间还是虚拟空间，也无论是在城市环境还是自然景观之中。受20世纪60年代“激浪派”（Fluxus）运动的影响，我也热衷于在不同环境中进行“介入”式创作；这种创作往往伴随着我的“漫无目的的游荡”——有时借助道具或提示，有时则纯粹随性而为。
“纽约和新泽西的这片景观对我而言意味着什么？”——这也是我在本项目中思考的一个问题。我喜欢这样一个故事：一位美国人在伦敦探索时，因大雾迷了路；回国后，他创立了“童军运动”（Boy Scouts）。“路径标识”既是一种空间干预，也是一种关怀；我希望能在自己的故乡也构建起这样的标识系统。本项目中形式、色彩与声音之间的张力令我着迷，一条设有导向标识的路径就像我们日常生活中“进入—身体—离开”这一心理语言学结构；就像和别人握手的时候，什么时机开始握？握多久？什么时机停止握手？也是这一心理学语言学结构的反映。