keys are moving, they generate moving keys. 2023 14x35inches pigment print, oil pastel, scratches
John Cage asked in 1958 "when a truck is passing by a music school or a factory, which is more musical"? I have been thinking about the moving truck signifying as a wandering heart, a risking mind and an international citizen who is always thinking of where to go and which direction to go.
A truck is a carrier, a vehicle of transportation and transformation, with the truck's aluminum surface reflecting sunrise, sunset, traffic lights and car lights while the wheels are always in motion. Along the journey, the truck keeps changing the color and light of its surface.
In this solo presentation, the artist is sharing a site of construc(k)tion with photo-based installation including a design element of yellow, which is a color that has been penetrating through in his previous practices, suggesting a sense of both continuation and separation, just like the yellow line in the middle of the road.
The truck is on stage, under spotlight. The truck printed in body-scale is the first image you will see when you enter the gallery space. Next to the butt of the truck, there is a ‘TURNTABLE’ lying there in stillness. Floating above the yellow lines painted unevenly with latex paint, there is a white shirt insisting installing on the wall with yellow pushpins. It writes ‘EASTURN’ and ‘WESTURN’ on the back of the shirt paired with the image of sunset and sunrise.
In this presentation, I hope the works surrounding ‘The Truck’ also carry the energy/atmosphere of ‘The Truck’, every pigment/pixel of it. The surrounding works include a drawing titled as ‘wind-shield wiper inside the mind’ and a mixed-media work ‘keys are moving, they generate moving keys’, six other photographs including urbanscape with yellow traffic lights, spreading gravels and sand in the parking lot, a cone-shape cloud floating above an abandoned concrete mixer next to a blurrrry ferrrrry, trespassing coneflower and ‘trees, road-lights and water-fall’.
If to make a floating frame, I think I will give it to ‘The TURNTABLE’ which brings it more volume to activate/vibrate the surfaces mapped in this space, from the butt of ‘The Truck’. I looked up the word ‘TURNTABLE’ in the dictionary, it shows up as following:
a: a rotating platform that carries a phonograph record
b: a platform with a track for turning wheeled vehicles (such as locomotives)
C: LAZY SUSAN common in Chinese restaurant
checklist
Matches of Matches, 2021, diemension variable
pigment print
Into the Wild, 2021, diemension variable
pigment print
pigment print
Backyard Stonehenge, 2021, diemension variablepigment print
Under the practice of aimless wandering in my daily life, I am interested in capturing and collecting found objects and materials in different size, shape, weight and volume, posing and composing them under different outdoor environment. In these three photographs, which I also consider as documentations of site specific temporal installation, stones, matches and flags are trying to find their own unique forms, compositions and states of being.
mock-up @theeyeseesmore in France
courtesy of Abbott Watts Residency, special thanks to Todd Watts
Grass, Mountain and Traffic Cone 2021
burned branches, nails
A mathematical problem from my primary school, “What is the shortest distance when an ant walks from A to B on a cone?” ha been lingering around my mind for a long time along with my observation of traffic cones when I am wandering around in New York city. The shortest distance from A to B is the length of straight line, though it is an irregular curve on a cone. I am interested in the gesture of unfolding when we solve this mathematical problem. It is not unlike people’s collective experiences when they walk across a lawn in a park and form “desire path,” which is shaped by convenience and efficiency.
Traffic cones also contain a sense of construction and deconstruction, carrying the meaning of policing to mark the boundary in public space suggesting where to go and where not to go. Thinking about the relationship between our bodies and traffic cones while countlessly passing by the signage “No Trespassing” , I started to make some mark-drawings with natural materials such as burned branches inspired by mono-ha movement happened in 1960s’ in Tokyo. I am interested in the forces and body movements activated on the burned branche when I was drawing on the wall, which creates different patterns and forms along with different states of being as branches in a spread-out space. Followed by the gesture of gravitational shift with branches, I am intrigued by the process of falling down and spreading out when the branches were hit against the wall. The image of the installation as a whole is like a decaying mountain with a marked trail inside. What was left on the floor are some small parts of the branches, some are powders, some are ashes. I got reminded of what a great poet Juyi Bai from Tang Dynasty wrote, “Lush, lush grass on the plain; Once every year it sears and grows. The wildfire tries to destroy it in vain; When the verna breeze blows, it comes to life again.” (Translated by Zheng Yu, Huazhan Feng)
Traffic cones also contain a sense of construction and deconstruction, carrying the meaning of policing to mark the boundary in public space suggesting where to go and where not to go. Thinking about the relationship between our bodies and traffic cones while countlessly passing by the signage “No Trespassing” , I started to make some mark-drawings with natural materials such as burned branches inspired by mono-ha movement happened in 1960s’ in Tokyo. I am interested in the forces and body movements activated on the burned branche when I was drawing on the wall, which creates different patterns and forms along with different states of being as branches in a spread-out space. Followed by the gesture of gravitational shift with branches, I am intrigued by the process of falling down and spreading out when the branches were hit against the wall. The image of the installation as a whole is like a decaying mountain with a marked trail inside. What was left on the floor are some small parts of the branches, some are powders, some are ashes. I got reminded of what a great poet Juyi Bai from Tang Dynasty wrote, “Lush, lush grass on the plain; Once every year it sears and grows. The wildfire tries to destroy it in vain; When the verna breeze blows, it comes to life again.” (Translated by Zheng Yu, Huazhan Feng)
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。
Meandering Markers of Murmurs, 2021, dimension variable
archival pigment print, latex paint, branch, mixed media