Silence
Art works
2004-2005 / Nîmes-Paris, France
The dust of the dead words clings to thee.
Wash thy soul with silence.
-- “Stray Birds” by Rabindranath Tagore
Appetite Trap Installation / 2004 / Nîmes, France
The work contains paradoxes. We know that in French, “baguette” not only means stick but also bread. In addition to linguistic meaning, many symbols (semiology, sociology, psychoanalysis) may be related to “baguette”, how should we define it?
On the wall, it was a famous saying of Mao “the revolution is not a gala dinner.” We have usually dealt with eastern problems in western "concepts" for more than 100 years, including the Chinese revolution. This "revolution" as a concept was given an idealistic color when it was imported into China by intellectuals like me who were not good at foreign languages. "Revolution" was no longer a low-level food issue, even Mao believed that revolution was not negociable, but a high-level ideal that required bloody and sacrificed violence to achieve. So is translation a trap?
A "baguette" trap:
wooden baguette / bread baguette？
content of the dinner / form of the dinner？
Slogan negation / scene affirmation？
realism / nihilism？
Magritte’s E-Pipe Installation / 2004 / Nîmes, France
After countless electronic copies and round-trip transmissions, Magritte’s pipe has been happily swimming like human sperm.
The happiness of the happy maker Video / 4’38” / 2005 / Paris, France
In this video, the subject can only understand the sentence written on the sole of the foot through the sense of touch, while the audiences share their feelings by reading the sentence. Here, the relationship between the subject and the audiences is linked by the text, and happiness was defined according to their own feelings. "Internal" or "external", I tried to separate these two happy experiences to awaken the original perception hidden in the language coding system.
The Structure of Truth Video installation / 1’20” / 2005 / Paris, France
Self-questioning and self-answering were about how the truth were structured, which were input into the escalator and then crowded together...
The immigration of Bible (From Hebrew to China)
Digital photography / 400mm*300mm / 2005 / Paris, France
Roland Barthes said: Comparison is reason. Can the comparison of languages be derived from weights? What are we measuring, word number or ambiguity? The text of the Bible can be traced back to Hebrew from Chinese, English, French, Italian, Latin and Greek. What I am curious about is whether this long translation can correctly convey the will of God? God dissolved human's ambition by means of different languages when the human built the Tower of Babel. At the same time, he had set a barrier for himself.