01 Unlimited Fortune
Print-based installation. Pine wood, silkscreen on chiffon. 150*200*3 cm.
02 New Armchair
Found object sculpture. Elm wood, fake wood grain paint, wood grain repair tape, eva foam floor mat. 55*55*85 cm.
03 Remembered Scenery
Photographic installation. UV soft film LED light box, 34*56 cm electronic calendar and clock with digital landscape painting. Single light box 24*36 cm.
Chinese society has its roots in the complete and self-contained existence of Jianghu (literally 'rivers and lakes', but metaphorically referring to a society of heroes beyond the reach of the government) and Shanlin (literally 'mountain and forest'). The foundation of political civilisation lies in the natural sphere of each individual. Since ancient times, high mountains and dense forests have been the ideal of the Chinese scholar, who retires to a hermit-like lifestyle. Such a direct antagonistic relationship with reality is spiritually liberating for their temperament. The city became the centre of political power, while the countryside was a kind of imaginary retreat. Rural societies build many defensive structures into the landscape, and vast mountains and great rivers often serve as the basis for the division of administrative regions, even inadvertently creating 'no man's land' for regime control. The landscape is as much about taking an official post as it is about anti-social attitudes.
Zomia is a new name for virtually all land above about three hundred metres in altitude, stretching from the central highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India, across five Southeast Asian nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Burma) and four provinces of China (Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi and parts of Sichuan). The Hill People are best understood as runaway, fugitive, marooned communities who, over the course of two millennia, have fled the oppressions of state projects in the valleys - slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and war. Everything about them can be seen as an elaborate strategy to remain beyond the control of the regime. Their physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their agricultural practices, their kinship structure, their malleable ethnic identities and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders all serve effectively to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent the emergence of states among them. Most of the areas in which they live can be aptly described as 'shatter zones' or 'zones of refuge', becoming a vacuum in urban planning. This phenomenon seems to coincide with the ideal politics that ancient Chinese scholars were trying to achieve together, namely a place where they were not threatened by power.
Because the Chinese landscape is already a holistic value, its redemptive meaning for people lies in the transcendental world that is reached after abandoning oneself to nature, i.e. the fusion of things and the self. In recent decades, however, such a utopian realm has been radically altered by the influx of new forces and trends. In the 1950s and 1960s, a new genre of Chinese painting emerged. The socialist landscape was designed to convey nationalist pride and the ideology of sovereignty, thus mobilising people's identification with the territory and the new regime. These images sought to break the previous coexistence of landscape and poverty, with rivers and mountains symbolising a reservoir of raw materials to be exploited and high hopes of lifting people out of poverty. The Ban Gioc-Detian Falls form a natural border between China and Vietnam. Waterfalls of a certain size that converge from above and below to form a river basin. Their shape has been interpreted as a treasure chest, meaning that all wealth is gathered along the currents. As a result, the Ban Gioc-Detian Falls served as a prototype for waterfalls in various decorative landscape paintings, and was constantly copied and appropriated. In the painted landscapes, values intertwine and many elements play out in complex ways, indirectly showing how contemporary China juggles between utilitarianism and idealism, control and emancipation, the concrete and the abstract.
Beneath the surface of the seemingly serene and peaceful Chinese painting of Shanshui (literally 'mountain and water' or 'landscape'), there is an undercurrent of conflict between different elements. Jianghu (literally 'rivers and lakes', but metaphorically referring to a society of heroes beyond the reach of the government) and Shanlin (literally 'mountain and forest'), which symbolise seclusion and escape from the world, are interpreted as gathering wealth. The aim is to develop the Ban Gioc-Detian Falls into a rosewood market to buy and sell rosewood furniture, a symbol of wealth and status. This rosewood product and the landscape painting based on the geographical origin of rosewood are in the same domestic space. I saw the hypocrisy and absurdity of imposing the traditional Chinese concept of 'unity of man and nature' on the reality of greed for profit and wealth.
Video screenshot from Shore of the Labyrinth, the Sky at Dawn (2023), 2'26''.