Song Jianshu: Seven-Diagram Tactics
By Huang Bihe
The exhibition is titled "Seven - Trigram Tictacs". The number seven refers to the number of works on display, and as for the relationship with the "trigram", it implies the meaning of the artist's work being related to measurement. The first two works at the entrance of the exhibition hall are made of reinforced steel. One is a vertical bundle and the other is a horizontal disc. "Equal" Ⅰ (2014) combines one thousand one-meter-long steel bars into an integrated iron column, merging many into one. "1 Meter Spiral" (2014) coils a steel bar into a spiral shape, and declares completion when the diameter of the circular disk reaches one meter. If the first two works are based on standard measurement scales as the form of the artwork, then "81 Chops" (2015) is a comparison between perceptual measurement and standard measurement. The artist cuts a one-meter-long steel pipe based on his own feelings, trying repeatedly until he gets a steel pipe with a length that relatively matches. The eighty-one steel pipes hanging on the exhibition wall demonstrate the entire "trial and error" process. In general, this can be seen as a "trial and error" process of rationalizing the International System of Units through one's own body, but in this improvisational process, there is a sense of "design": why is it precisely eighty-one? This number is like expressing the idea that nine times nine eventually boil down to one, or telling a Buddhist story of cultivation and success, full of mystery. Here, the artist reveals his ambiguous attitude towards measurement, that the dialectical relationship between physical measurement and metric measurement is nothing more than the external manifestation of a more mysterious measurement.
"One Span" (2012) is also about the relationship between the body and the measurement system, and touches on the origin of measurement standards. The ancient Chinese measurement units were initially related to a certain part of the body, such as the width of the hand or the length of the arm. In this work, the artist enlarges his own flick seven times and makes a steel ruler that is seven times larger than the metric standard. Under cold light, the delicate and intricate steel ruler bears the artist's touch and body temperature, returning something that originated from the body to the body. In another work, "Hard To Miss" (2015), Song Jianshu throws coal balls from the viewing platform on the second floor of the exhibition hall onto the wall on the first floor. The coal dust left on the wall and the looping sound of the impact attempt to reproduce the entire process of the artist's action. The viewing platform is 25 times the size of the target, the wall is 25 times the size of the viewing platform, and there are 625 coal balls. Rather than the material of coal itself, Song Jianshu seems to be obsessed with perfect square numbers, which was already evident in "81 Chops". On the one hand, he is obsessed with the perfection and accuracy of numbers, and on the other hand, he exposes the errors of perception, resulting in scattered marks that deviate from the target center and uneven lengths in "81 Chops". Between these two thoughts, the artist's "divination" art actually has a "precise" aspect: it does not involve real standards, nor does it concern the deviations brought about by the body. The artist uses them as rhetoric, attempting to occupy the precise position that can make "aesthetics" happen.
