Walking To The Lichtung — Song Jianshu’s Sculpture Art
By Xu Mengke
Don't think about asking for it; return to yourself.
Truth so exists in the soul.
-- St. Augustine
Throughout the 1930s, the existentialist philosopher Heidegger dwelled in a log cabin in the middle of the Todtnau Mountains. He believes that here, in the "slow and calm euealyptus", he can enter the best state of thinking. This slightly cold view seems lonely and slow. Heidegger developed his own thoughts on "truth" here. It is more appropriate to introduce Jianshu Song's works with this anecdote. Jianshu Song's first works as sculptors were based on the trunk as a material to think about the nature of art and truth. The work "The Last" is a towering scorpion trunk. He removes the branches of the trunk itself and slowly slashes the trunk into a cone. The level of the underside of the tree itself is trimmed so that the trunk can maintain its self-reliance; in “Untitled”, Jianshu Song plans the natural curvature of another thicker trunk to be geometrically divided. In this way, the trunk maintains its growing posture and acquires another possibility of being. Through similar treatments, both works show a pure sense of existence, and are lonely and slow — stripping away all desires, they become the concept of “survival” itself. It is with this extremely simplified process that Jianshu Song began to explore a material truth. Heidegger translated the Greek word "aletheia" into "unverborgenheit". He believed that the artist's job is to help the thing itself slowly move toward the "unverborgenheit" state, that is, to let things no longer hide. Jianshu Song's artistic practice is following this logic. He, through huge and silent objects, forces us to go to the "unverborgenheit" state, to face the true meaning of the existence of things.
In fact, this process of "unverborgenheit" also exists in the work process of Jianshu Song himself. Jianshu Song, in his life, is a slightly quiet person, paying more attention to “feeling” than “expression”. He is more like a bystander, drawing energy in life itself, accumulating feelings, and focusing on thinking and releasing in the creative process. He once admitted in the interview that he had only a general "feeling" before his creation, and in the process of turning this "feeling" into an actual work, he paid more attention to his own state and grasped the work rhythm with the current feelings. As a result, he constantly explores the feelings of being present, and “get out of the shadows” together with the works. And this process is the process of going to the "Lichtung" and going to the process of sparseness. After a period of creative practice, Jianshu Song gradually began to think about the difference between existence and the so-called truth. He believes that aesthetics itself arises from this difference, and that the process of exploration constitutes the basic form of aesthetics. So during this time, Jianshu Song tended to feel the world around him in a near-satisfied attitude and expressed this feeling in a cold way. This seems to be a paradox, but he found a subtle balance in it. On the one hand, he starts from his own feelings and forces himself to approach a certain physical limit; on the other hand, he presents these crazy experiments with a simple and calm shape.
Therefore, when we look closely at his works of this period, there will always be a feeling of trepidation. "81 Cuts" can be seen as a masterpiece of his time. Jianshu Song made 8 I repeated attempts, and finally relied on his own feelings to produce a length of exactly one meter. The number itself surprised him, so he chose to show the eighty-one "trial and error" with polished steel pipes. This “challenging” of instrumental rationality with its own feelings is full of design meaning, but at the same time it reflects a primitive desire to approach the so-called truth. He thinks about standards in his mind and at the same time becomes the standard itself. In this way, we can find that in Jianshu Song's creation of at this stage, the works are in the process of approaching the truth, constructing a compact space - he does not want to be exposed to the open and direct sunlight in the lichtung, he wants to start from his own feelings and walk in the path from "shadowing" to "unverborgenheit", and infinitely approaching the lichtung.
The works at this stage can be said to be a turning point in Jianshu Song's creation, and also like a research on the formation of aesthetics. Through the flattening and wall-mounted works, he gradually developed his own way of expressing space. After clarifying this point, Jianshu Song began another level of exploration. He wants the facts that exist, not the shadows of existence. He wants to explore the existence itself in three dimensions, from two- dimensional to three-dimensional, from plane to space. When he was circling on the winding road, Jianshu Song realized that his understanding of the concept of "length" made him fold the meaning of some feelings. This time, Jianshu Song no longer uses his own feelings to measure the "length", but chooses another way to experience and approach this concept. In the work "1 Km Tower", Jianshu Song hung the 1000-meter-long steel bar and finally cast the linear concept of"km" into a 3-meter-high tower cone; in "Equivalence and Consciousness I", he had 1000 I-meter-long steel bar bundled into a 1 meter high iron column and welded at both ends. After the two works have taken shape, Jianshu Song chose to polish the surface. Behind this heavy and boring physical work, he still tries to convey his consistent physical experience. He physically felt the form of order and personalized some of the compulsory concepts. Behind the seemingly unpredictable appearance of his work, he still has the courage to kneel on the edge of the forest. In Jianshu Song's long-term thinking and practice, he constantly returns to himself and explores the section between the boundaries. With awe of the truth, Jianshu Song uses a kind of rational poetry to show the bright scene that is close to the lichtung. He continued to walk into the lichtung, and he himself became a landscape on the way to the lichtung.
Translated by Cui Tianzhi
