From “Almost Standard” To “Hard To Miss”
By Song Jianshu
If it is said that since 2010, the work of "Almost Standard" and "A Span" has been crowned with the feeling of the body in the name of concept, then the "1 Km Tower", "1 M Spiral" and "Equivalence and Consciousness" completed in 2014 are to re-construct the concept of convention through the shift of the voice, and the works of "81 Cuts", "3.5 Second Landing" and "Absolute Safe", which were started in 2015, are affirmation of a kind of aesthetics based on misalignment and deviation.
When I created "Almost Standard", I used my eyes to determine the length of 1 meter, and made a meterstick with a piece of wood that was only 95.5 centimeters long. Although this meter was not accurate, it was correct in feeling. This work opens the door to my trust in my body and feelings. Behind this door, I see a truly individual approach to uniqueness. Later, I made use of the length of my body to make another size-related work - "A Span" measuring the length with a "span" is an ancient and practical method. It is derived from the body as well as the foot and elbow measurements. It finally becomes a standardized measure. What is interesting is that even though the physical sense and the material itself are very different, the scale symbolizes the language of people's sense of space in a highly abstract form. I used the image of the standard scale as the carrier in the work "A Span", letting it label a personal one-time result that was magnified seven times. At that time, the scale lost its measurement function while leaving a symbol that can't be defined whether it belongs to the individual body or belongs to the group experience.
Although these two pieces of wall-displaying works have no problem in the correspondence between the creative methods and the concepts of the works, the lack of three-dimensionality and sculptural sense of the works has left me as a sculptor a little sense of lost. I began to realize that whenever I think of a certain length of time, there is always a straight line between the two points in the mind. This flat thinking obviously does not help me. Only one day when I drove around on the mountain highway, I suddenly became enlightened: When the linear motion became a curvilinear movement, the space did not immediately start to expand. Based on this idea, I will practice a length of 1,000 meters. The bar was coiled into a 3-meter-high conical tower, a monument I made for a length of one kilometer. The "1 M Spiral" that turns a steel bar into a disc is a "dimension reduction" treatment for "1 Km Tower". When the angle of view turns to two-dimensional, I find that the absolute length of this bar is in the plane. Language loses its meaning. On the contrary, as the number of laps constantly superimposed on its surface forms its linguistic characteristics, I naturally give up on the setting of the total length of the steel to end the work. Instead, I choose to cut it after its diameter reached one meter. "Equivalence and Consciousness" considers the transformation of space and reality, simplicity, and complexity. It bundles 1,000 rods of one- meter-long rods into a nearly solid cylinder, and they are welded together tightly. Finally, the two ends are flat. Fully welded and polished to completion. This seemingly mediocre, orderly, unified, and coercive object has consumed a lot of labor and time to complete. In fact, if it is to get this simple shape, more convenient methods can be used to satisfy the vision. Even more refined results can be obtained. But I think that for a creator, everything he does is to obtain an existing fact rather than a shadow of fact.
After completing "Almost Standard", I always had a feeling of incompleteness. I tried to find an answer. How many failures did I have to make, and how did my body's ability to perceive a perfect match with that public standard? The result of practices after 80 times of failure, the goal was finally achieved at the 81st time. The target was almost exactly one meter (error is less than 1 mm). When I put together the 8 I tubes that recorded their own visual results, these long “shortcomings” were arranged in a poetic structure. I call this piece “81 Cuts” also because the result of this number is too dramatic beyond imagination. This work began to make me realize that it was precisely because of all the deviations and errors that existed that it constituted aesthetics. Imagine if the world was made up of standard templates, there would be no such thing as style, personality, exoticism, and splendid beauty. Although there have never been two identical parabolic trajectories in the world, there is not any parabola that is more perfect than the others. Each parabola has been perfectly represented by its own unique arc and tension. This idea was later implemented in the work "3.5 Second Landing". Each of the 10 randomly fonned steel bars was beautifully and independently intertwined in space, and together formed an empty field. “81 Cuts” and "Absolute Safe" share the same method through the “missing” of the target to form an image. Many “between two thoughts” — said the critic Bihe Huang — “neither interferes with the real standard, nor about the difference brought by the body, artists use them as metaphor and try to occupy the accurate position which can incer “aesthetic” between the two.”
Translated by Cui Tianzhi
