Untitled

2023
beef fat, bamboo and casted models, sound installation

I was keeping telling people this work’s about refusing to talk and the refusal of talking. But now I think it’s about endurance. 

It consists of multiple parts. 
A heating plate on the top of it, melting animal fat. 
3 casted objects I made out of a section of bamboo. 
Contact mics inside each of the object, so every time when the fat drop on them, the sound will be picked up. There’s a distinct difference of sound quality between each objects.

On the pedestal is a container used to collect the dripping fat, to make the complete installation a circulation and a gesture of casting. 

The casted objects were made of bone powder and charcoal powder. There was an attempt to present the most of the material quality. Not really surprisingly, the charcoal powder one snaped when installing, then I decided this should be how it is.

Skit

It was kind of the protype of the work Knowing so little that we go symbolic. 

I wrote a statement for it, but it doesn’t make any sense to me reading it back 1 year later.

An alternative place to rest your butt

• 2023

Locating at 915 E 60th St, Chicago, Logan Center for the Arts, it’s a 3 steps staircase heading downward, which has a comfortable cushion on the 1st step to place a butt and generous space at the bottom to rest your legs. Sitting down there and get a nice position with your eye level as high as all the plants surrounding you.

A bad idea

2023
Video, chicken wire, liquid latex

A video made with a specific black screen in mind. It was took in my old studio locating  at the basement of Washinton building, hundreds of inches deep down the ground. All I could hear there was the sound of the elevator.

This 7 * 4ft uneven screen was made of chicken wire and liquid latex, occupying the most part of a studio dry wall. I imaged how this texture would work with the video, then i found my studio was not light proofed and it could never turn dark unless I shut down the electricity of the whole floor. 

Anyways I had to show it to people, and I asked for cold readings because I didn’t think I knew this work better than anyone else, and I got some interesting ones. A professional and successful looking design guy thinking it was a sexual implement of self-touching (the black screen really confused him I assume) was the best moment I got. 

A cigarette pack can be lit up like a cigarette

2021
Cigarette packs, parafine wax, steel grid

Flammable cigarette packs pricing from $0.5 to $10. An attempt to break down the hierarchy built around cigarette brands in the society I used to belong.

My favorite things

2021
Bean sprouts, LED diodes, Guitar strings, electrified fish tank

There was a long period of time during the covid that my art practice was all about the relation between objects, time and me. I think it’s because I spent most of my time with them, observing, thinking, and developing a way to kill the time. 

Bean sprouts is a cheap food source, which I don’t even have to buy. LED is the cheap substitute for neon in my country, I call it the fake neon. Those used guitar strings were kept by me for years. All of them are some small threads of my life, then one day I suddenly found these three little things have very same shape. 

I started to think about the status of being existing, and somehow, to me it means being constantly changing and exchanging, no matter of the property of the material ­— metal or organic, still or kinetic.  

There were a lot going on in this container I made ­— I called it an ecosystem box. The bean sprouts were trying to reaching to the water to get more nutrition, but they died soon after their roots were able to contact the water because that was electrified. The metal strings got rusty in the water, that rust then polluted the water and made the LEDs turn dark.

What can I hold you with?

2020
Garden stones, Nixie clock

I piled up stones where my dog’s died body is buried underneath. The device glowing on the top is called Nixie tube, a very old type of clock used in the 60s that dies when the gas in it is used up. I know there’s approximately 2 thousand hours life left for this clock, but I don’t know exactly at which moment it’ll suddenly freeze and go out.

To memorizing is one of the very primitive purposes of sculpture, in my opinion. Differing from painting, a sculpture puts a physical mark on the earth, an anchor that’ll never move like the status of the body freezes when it died. But meanwhile, it keeps change all the time, with the material decays, rusts, or gets covered with grass and moss in this case. Then the notion of time starts to show on the sculpture, and then it turns to a monument.

Ghosts in the city

2021
Semiconductor wafer installed in an abandoned site

I trespassed on an abandoned factory, bringing the product it used to produce back and making it fit into the space. The specific product is called semiconductor wafer (material used to produce IC chips and semiconductor), which is visually appealing and I see it as an embodiment of modern life. 

The idea was inspired by a not-well-known Japanese art concept named Hyperart Thomasson, which describes modern city as a fleeting phenomenon, hence some parts of it could become a piece of art in itself. It’s actually a common scenario in developing countries where architects are constantly taken down and rebuilt.