Just as light must be foregrounded by darkness, pure humanity seems even more precious in this chaotic mundane world. The exhibition, Away from the Long Night, tackles issues close to the contemporary era, and presents the outstanding works by four Asian artists born in the 1960s and 1970s: SHI Jin-Hua, SONG Dong, YEE I-Lann, and YIN Xiuzhen. From the emotional connections between individuals, the reflections on national and racial status, doubts toward capitalism, to a review of the essence of time and its “existence and emptiness,” their works demonstrate unique insights into life and contemplation on the social environment, and commence an artistic dialogue with various mediums that refreshes our views and minds.
The Power of Embraces
A hug is the most powerful body language that sooths and invigorates our hearts. Through the act of embracing, individuals have conducted emotional interactions, built connections, and conveyed understanding for one another. YEE I-Lann commenced a series of works with images of “embraces” since 2012. She invites her friends and the Malaysian people to provide photos of hugs. With post-editing, the images of hugging arms are extracted, colored with bright orange and set against a saturated blue background, forming an intense visual work in contrasting colors. Through her design, each of the images implicates a letter of the alphabet, and together they form an inspiring text. The complementary colors of orange and blue echo the idea of an embrace, which carries the meaning of giving support and making up for each other’s insufficiencies. Visually speaking, a sense of dynamics and instability could be detected along the boundary between the two colors. When we look at the work for a short period of time and move our eyes away from the image, the persistence of vision with the exchange of the two colors will surface, reminding us that every story always has two sides. Placing ourselves in the other’s perspective will allow us to have a more well-rounded understanding when facing diversity, and we will be able to handle the situation with more wisdom.
The second chapter of this series is titled In the Dark Dark Heavy Dark Night I Was Listening to the Secret Sounds of the Earth and I Heard You and Your Sweat Became That of Fear Didn't It in the Dark Dark Heavy Dark. This passage, comprised of 136 pieces of prints, is YEE’s latest response to the long-lasting racial and ethnic issues in Malaysia. While encompassing both a sense of love and its complementary opposite of loss, the work emphasizes and amplifies the aspect of mutual understanding and tolerance in human nature through the embracing act of mutual support.
The Measurement of Emotion
Comparing to YEE I-Lann’s gathering, selection, post-production of images, and finally extracting the layered visuality of “embraces,” SHI Jin-Hua also makes use of hugs, but through his actual physical behavior. With the scale of a common mortal and slow accumulation over the time, SHI measures out his relationship to the world.
Interpersonal relationships are measured with performance art in Hugging Project, which was created from 2003 to 2004 during SHI’s residency at PS1 of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Through a simple act of hug, SHI recorded the measurements of human encounters and friendship from an artistic perspective. SHI invited fellow artists who were in residency with him at PS1 from 2003 to 2004 to co-create this project: he embraced each artist from a different part of the world and cultural background, and marked the circumference of the embrace on the inside of his left arm where his right hand fingers reached. He, then, asked the artist to sign his or her name next to the marking of the measurement, and thus, recorded their encounter in this period of time with this particular friend’s body circumference. At the end, SHI hugged himself with his arms and left the markings on his own back with his own name, putting an end to the project. With his own body and artistic sensibility, SHI Jin-Hua’s Hugging Project also subtly recounted his personal thinking on national and racial politics, reflecting the ambiguous status of Taiwan being a country and its solitary position in foreign affairs with a documentation of his international friendship as an individual.
The Dimension of Warmth in Memory
Memory has always been the essential theme of YIN Xiuzhen’s practice. Born in Beijing in 1963, the artist grew up in the utopian fantasy of communism, but had to face the torrents of globalization and economic neoliberalism after her adolescence. Living in Beijing, where the old is replaced rapidly with the new, YIN has always remained highly suspicious of the collective optimism of eagerly throwing away the past and welcoming the new. On the strength of her sensitivity and interest in “objects,” YIN’s work always radiates a nostalgic warmth and unique feminine tenderness while re-examining the existing framework of the reality, cautioning about this competitive, fast advanced world.
YIN Xiuzhen has been using second-hand clothes as her artistic material. For her, the used clothing carries certain warmth and is like the wearer’s second skin, soaked with his or her feelings and stories. Bookshelf No. 22 is one of the many installation pieces that YIN has created with second-hand clothes. She wrapped wood blocks with the collected old clothing, and created a complex sculptural platform that encompassed knowledge and sensibility. The front of this work looks like a bookshelf filled with books, while the back resembles a closet for storing clothes. With the information they carry, books often symbolize the power of knowledge, the elite class, as well as the framework of knowledge passed down through generations. However, YIN’s wrapping of wood blocks with common second-hand clothes replaces the esteemed knowledge system with ordinary objects, not only softening and warming up the austerity of knowledge but also delineating the transformation of the communication system. Here, the knowledge system is no longer monopolized by a certain social class, but belongs to the public. As a result, through the displacement and transformation of symbols, Bookshelf No. 22 states the reflection on contemporary civilization with an attitude that is both warm and powerful.
The Existence with Invisible Traces
In comparison to YIN Xiuzhen’s sensitivity to objects, SONG Dong’s interest lies in the exploration of the invisible force or the contemplation on the rhythm of the universe. His work often starts from his personal action or examination of living experiences, and moves onto the collective condition of the society, even to dialectics at the level on the universal spirit. We frequently witness the artist making art in public spaces or his appearance in his works. This method makes SONG’s works, to a certain degree, his own spiritual discipline in this world.
SONG Dong has been studying Taoism thoroughly, and has deep understanding of the movement of time as well as the correlation of the real and the unreal. Writing Time with Water Beijing embodies SONG’s profound thinking of our existence and the essence of time. He dipped a writing brush in clear water, and wrote down the hour, minute and second of that exact moment when he did so in a hutong (alley) in Beijing. Time was, then, marked on the ground, but disappeared into nothingness as water evaporated with the pass of the time, leaving no traces whatsoever. In this work, the artist attempted to capture the instantaneity of time and makes obvious the relationship between the revealed and hidden as well as the existence and emptiness. With its exploration of the essence of time, Writing Time with Water Beijing insightfully touches upon the issue of existence in life with an act of performance art, and the artist’s writing of time that leaves no traces has precisely corresponded to the Taoist philosophy of “doing nothing and letting things take their own course,” which is exactly “an act of gaining by gaining nothing.”
The Sun Will Rise in the East and Deliver Us from This Long Night
In this past year, wars, accidents, natural and man-made disasters kept taking place. Being the year of Jiawu in Chinese lunar calendar, 2014 has almost corresponded to the year of warfare, which Jiawu signifies. However, facing drastic changes and catastrophes is what it takes for civilizations to evolve and advance in the course of history. The glory of humanity is hardly visible in peaceful and comfortable times, thus life must receive the lessons of difficulties through hardship, learn to rise up in consecutive setbacks, and face the nerve-wrecking future in unison. Charles Dickens’s words best sum up this unchanging universal value: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” It reminded us that when facing difficulties, we should not blow them out of proportion. Art will always shin through times of disasters or hardship. Just as what YEE I-Lann has stated in her first chapter in the series based on “embraces”: “The Sun Will Rise in the East and Deliver Us From This Long Night.” [1]
[1] The first chapter of this series, The Sun Will Rise in the East and Deliver Us from This Long Night, was announced in 2012. In 2014, she published the prelude, Rasa Sayang, and the second chapter, In the Dark Dark Heavy Dark Night I Was Listening to the Secret Sounds of the Earth and I Heard You and Your Sweat Became That of Fear Didn't It in the Dark Dark Heavy Dark. The third and fourth chapter will be released in 2016 and 2018 respectively.