Xie Nanxing: The Painted Struggle

JES FAN: I guess I am more known for using biological substances and embedding them inside my sculptures or infusing them with my sculptures. But the desire really is to de-emphasise the kind of anthropomorphic centre of these substances that are often so tied to identity. The desire is to actually propose that working with these substances are actually not that different than working with plaster in my studio or, blowing glass, or carving fibreglass. ‘Interior landscape’, or ‘interior trauma’, is an experience that you can’t necessarily describe with language but an interiority that you can only feel. The word’ Sites of Wounding’ Actually, I stole it from an instruction manual that describes how to harvest agarwood incense out of these trees. It describes these sites of when they either drill a hole in the tree or, carve out a tree, or chop the tree; they call it the site of wounding.

Essentially, to have agarwood, the tree has to endure some sort of injury, and then the tree has an immune response. Like without the injury, the tree is actually quite porous that exhibits traits of ability to regenerate in sites of wounding where sites of where they’re injured. It’s a narrative that I’m trying to unpack that touches upon not just this idea of belonging but also this idea of using these non-human bodies as raw materials to inform some sort of trauma within our human bodies that’s accrued culturally or socially.

This was in the Tokyo National Museum. And I found all these journals studying the interiority of these Kamakura Buddhas, what appears to be one thing: the interior has an entirely different experience. So, I spent a lot of time there experiencing these sculptures. In order to harvest [agarwood] there, I actually make clear what the shape of the wound is. You have to actually carve out the body. So that led me into doing CT scans of my body and printing my body, my interior body and making these sculptures that’s about interior landscape.

JES FAN: (Cantonese) These are cross-sections of my right leg obtained from a CT scan. There are six of them in total; this is one of them; the work on the wall is another. This time, I really want to interrogate the wall as an object, the wall as a material and the gallery as a material to work with. So, three works are actually embedded within the gallery walls. There’re slits in the walls that you can peer into.

JES FAN: Art and sciences are essentially just ways of questioning. They are not opposing in my world. I think, ultimately, what drew me into studying glass earlier when I was a student is I’m deeply fascinated by how things are made, what things are made out of, and ‘How do I make that?’. And pushing these questions, not just applying to objects but also applying to my body and my identity. Like, how is femininity formed? How is masculinity made? How is melanin made? If I keep pushing and pushing, what kind of absurdist question can I end up with? And same as art, I think they all arrive at just more questions.

MIAO YING: I think the two words to describe the works at the Sigg Prize exhibition are ‘ominous’ and ‘naive’. ‘Ominous’ is the kind of danger that you don’t really know what’s going on. And then ‘naive’ addresses the work. A lot of the forms are really bright-coloured, and they are cartoonish.

I think website and the internet is really an enlightenment. [It’s] like an influencer; it can be a lifestyle. It really influenced my artistic style because [it’s] from [the] internet that I really appreciate the sense of humour and how people react to the issues. I think that’s the core of the internet. When I was first working with AI, people didn’t have the access to it, and now it is really a tool for [the] masses. They’re actually generating content, like now. I found it’s like we’re in an interesting relationship.

The work that will be shown at M+ is an almost four-year project that has three chapters. It’s called Pilgrimage into Warden XII. The first chapter, The Honor of the Shepherds, are six brains that we pre-trained for a really, really long time, [a] couple months. So, at the beginning, they don’t even know how human joints, you know, how we bend like there is a limit. So, the big data were fed [into the AI]. Chapter two is a film. The script was written completely by GPT-3, and I took the script, then I directed the film on [a] game engine. So, in the third chapter, all the models have already been trained, and they have been unleashed, and it’s chaos.

The website really serves as a guide, a menu of the whole project. I think those three chapters kind of witness the rise of AI to look into the future of, like, how are we going to deal with the [AI] technology. At the exhibition, there is going to be this physical installation. When you first came in, you’re greeted by the towers, and they look like Gothic medieval towers. And [you will see that] they will be torched, but they’re not torched all the way. So, I think that is a metaphor of the early phase of AI training. And so this is the third chapter. They’re already trained and torched and burned, like maybe being trained too much. So, they’re like black.

All chapters have to do with machine learning, which is the technique that I have been researching and working with the past couple of years. In my work, I always kind of seek for those nonsense narrative like my other website-like projects. There’s always this made-up ideological concept. It’s almost like a political lifestyle branding.

I think in my work, I’m trying to address it as if the artists were the slave to the AI. So that’s one possibility. Like, if the AI replace the artists, in that scenario, what is that gonna be? Who is going to shepherd the shepherds?

My concern [about AI] is that it’s going to be very pixelated. So, they learned all this big data from what existed on internet. And I think what that does is dangerous. It’s that it can really make our history pixelated. So, you don’t know what’s true anymore. For future human generations, say if they wanted to find something [online], [they’ll realise] the history is, like, being rewritten. It’s really hard to imagine.

WANG TUO: (Mandarin) The keywords of this series are ‘aftershock’ and ‘here and now’. The concept of ‘aftershock’ actually pertains to how we perceive the history of our current time and place. I began my artistic practice as a painter, but in the process of painting, I slowly discovered that different problems require different weapons to solve. It was probably then that I felt video might be a good idea.

Painting and video share many commonalities. How do we get to the point in discussions? We could add a buffer, a middle ground between a conclusion and how it’s discussed. The buffer is a pathway for viewers to gain understanding. Video and painting share similarities in this regard.

This project is titled The Northeast Tetralogy. It consists of four video works. I embarked on this project with inspiration drawn from my hometown in northeastern China, where there appear to be a lot of shamanic activities. Shamanism has given me inspiration of sorts. This shamanism is not shamanism related to religious fundamentalism. It’s more like a view of history extracted and rendered abstract. So, I transformed it into what I call ‘pan-shamanification’, a mechanism that tries to solve present problems.

When a person is troubled by uncertainty and unsolved problems in their space-time, can they become conduits? Their bodies could become gateways for souls from other dimensions, bringing alternative experiences and perspectives to help resolve their problems. For this project, I’ve put all four works into the same space like mountains piled upon each other. When you’re in the mountains, the complete view remains hidden from sight. The feelings these segments evoke may become your imagination of the mountains.

But the timeline of The Northeast Tetralogy starts with the May 4th Movement in 1919 and ends in 2019. The first chapter, Smoke and Fire, is about the 2018 killings in China committed by [convicted murderer] Zhang Koukou, who was sentenced to death in 2019. These killings to avenge his mum’s death undoubtedly broke the law. On the other hand, many people felt Zhang stood for a tradition now lost in China, a hero archetype that hadn’t shown its face in a long time. In the later stages of creating this work, the character Zhang led me to certain concepts, including appearing later in Distorting Words.

While filming Guo Qinguang, I wanted to find a setting similar to this. A young student finds a tree by a lotus pond and then hangs himself. In the last hundred years, these historical moments seem to be caught in a time warp and, in the end, become entangled. A line in Tungus describes something like my experience in different time and space in history.

In Tungus, the protagonists are two Korean soldiers. They participated in the Chinese Civil War. During the same time, in their homeland, the Jeju Uprising is happening. The final chapter, Wailing Requiem, felt like a parallel metaphor to make. Wailing Requiem takes seeds planted in previous chapters, stylistic relationships that couldn’t be clearly referenced and removes the veil between them.

In my work, people grapple with the dilemmas of their particular time and space in history. I use these dilemmas and organise them unrelentingly because when we look at history, we, too, feel pessimistic. Despite all their efforts, their problems could not be solved swiftly and promptly. Yet, by building upon our predecessors’ foundation of toil, we continue to try to solve the problems we face here and now. We may realise that we are situated in one of history’s aftershocks, and our present situation and actions may one day, too, become an aftershock.

XIE NANXING: (Mandarin) The keyword of the triptych, ‘The Ballad of Pieter Picking His Teeth’, is ‘struggle’. It’s meant to be very dark and extremely absurd because imagine: the damage to the environment is done for sure. It’s a crippling tragedy. A demon in your heart wants out. It becomes a twisted form of expression. It’s a question. It’s three questions or more.

The work establishes a kind of dialogue with the viewer. However, in this dialogue, no one is asking you questions. You must infer the issues yourself. That’s why it’s a struggle. On this wall are some sketches I made at the time, sketches for the triptych. Their ideas stem from inspiration. All three paintings have to do with sewage. For instance, I was inspired by the vacuum trucks I see frequently on the streets. Especially the septic trucks that remove excrement and take them elsewhere for treatment.

I may have observed these things daily and unintentionally for years. And then, I found this aspect that stirred my emotions. I began to mull them [my emotions] over. I ended up making sketches that allowed me to start working. I imagine the city’s infrastructure, the construction of all the buildings, the development of communities, water pipes, water sources, and sources of human excrement and where it’s headed. What came to mind was, ‘What an interesting system it all is’. What interests me is the comparison of how people blindly head to the same pit of raw sewage, a cesspool where everything is lumped together, and there’s no distinction between real and surreal. In other words, life is shit. That’s it.

How do concrete objects come together? It’s an indescribable, abstract relationship. I believe many painters have had similar experiences. You’ll notice your painting [looks different] under sunlight. It’s because the paint is not always thick. It’s probably not uniform in thickness. So, you’ll notice thin and thick strokes, and you’ll realise the interplay of light completely transforms the artwork.

‘The Ballad of Pieter Picking His Teeth’ comprises three parts. One part is related to the Rorschach Test, the psychological test. The second part turns ‘diarrhoea’ into a monstrous image. The third features the demonisation of a sewage pumping situation in a park. The title ‘The Ballad of Pieter Picking His Teeth’ concerns folk ballads. The entire triptych evokes the tradition of poetry from the Middle Ages. It embodies story, description, mockery, as well as feelings and worldviews that can’t be put into words.

I believe this set of paintings projects very strong feelings and a strong sense of uncertainty. Between this pink wall and the work, the contrast is striking. At the same time, it’s as if the work has been excised from the space. I like this pink colour because it’s close to human skin. The theme of the work is people. Painting itself has the power to create scenes just like poetry. It’s poetry in the form of images. With paintings, you can’t tell others how they should perceive it because they may see different aspects of the work from you. Otherwise, it would have no relation to art and become [an] illustration or promotion.

It’s not only about what my work expresses. Viewers need to struggle to understand it. ‘In this work of yours, I read what I can read.’ I feel this is the process of the struggle.

TREVOR YEUNG: (Cantonese) These works look at the ideas of ‘review’ and ‘move on’. Dealing with one’s emotions is also about reviewing and moving on. To me, these two ideas refer to problems about making art or living life that I will need to resolve.

When I kept fish as a child, I learned that if you didn’t know how an aquarium’s ecosystem worked, the fish would die. You may not know everything about the fish you keep, but you do know that if you did something wrong, the entire tank would die.

Just because you seek to understand a system doesn’t mean you’re trying to control it but rather explore how to thrive in it. Many of my works are about interpersonal relationships. I find it difficult to communicate effectively with people. Some people ask me about my relationship with plants in my work. I often say they are performers. They participate in my creation. With them, I deliver my message.

If the money tree is just placed on the ground, you might not realise the braided trunks are pressing against one another. As the plant looks static, you won’t see the tension within it. But with these strings, the way they intertwine extends and becomes a tension beyond the plant. So, when you look at it, you see that the trees suffer hanging up there. The trees are actually pressing against themselves.

Take the pandemic; it is beyond our control. When you are hung in mid-air, however, you move even when it is as if you almost fall. You don’t really fall. The trees are in this state where they have not yet moved on.

Many artists have created many works about COVID-19. As for me, I experienced the SARS epidemic, and what I found unique about that is that it made us react less drastically this time to COVID. Instead, we thought about ways to handle problems or rather, we looked inward for themes or ideas. The works I made were about our quarantine experiences and the uncertainties we faced in Hong Kong, and that touches on a greater issue. For viewers outside Hong Kong, they might see the changes that are pertinent to their regions. The entire world is actually facing the same problem.

In Red Brighter, there is a billboard playing commercials on a loop, lighting up the whole of Victoria Harbour. It is about a kind of repetitiveness. As we look once again at a billboard playing the same thing, you might feel that the commercial becomes so imprinted on your mind you won’t find it strange anymore.

There are two paths for viewers; one requires you to queue up, and the other one doesn’t. The former leads to a room where two works are Mr Cuddle in a Hotel Room and Wall of a Hamster Cage (Mira Moon). That was like the queue you had at immigration waiting to be quarantined. If you choose not to experience it, you can walk right through it as if you didn’t leave Hong Kong these past few years. Night Mushroom Colon (M+) is actually the best way to reflect as we move on.

I am on my own, yet I am not in solitude. I am just being alone. It is about how you handle being alone and the way you adapt to it. The adapter is a metaphor for how we adapt to a space. What I now need to do most, or think my work needs to do the most, is getting its viewers to consider how they perceive their situations or how they deal with their emotions.

Everyone is experiencing all of this repeatedly. It comes down to how much reviewing you can do and how far you can move on. But then maybe you will never move on.

YU JI: (Mandarin) The keywords for my four works in the Sigg Prize exhibition are ‘sculpture’ and ‘recycle’. To me, sculpture is more than an orthodox medium for art-making or a form of expression. It encompasses my contemplation of materials, weight, form, and the volume of objects, as well as their relationship with their surroundings.

Recycling is about the relationships between the many materials I use in my practice. For my project over the past two years, I have been on the move, staying temporarily in different cities. How can I travel with my creations? And what must I let go of in the process? I think these considerations reflect a sort of sustainability which sees recycling as a way of life.

As for my artistic practice, I’m interested in natural forms and materials from nature. When I talk about nature, I mean urban nature, a natural environment shaped by our city. I don’t want to go back to the natural environment. I am more intrigued by how, as an ordinary person, I think about planting, ecology, and vegetation and the way I live.

I’ve always felt that stones are symbolic. People project their worship of nature onto stone structures. In cultures and religions across different regions, stones are important symbols. Concrete is made from stone as well. So, these materials and forms are, in fact, related.

Among the four pieces of work, The hammock piece is the most special. Viewers can see the form of a hammock containing construction waste collected around the city. What I made with my hands is the hammock itself. The material I used to weave it is quite flexible. Everything in it was collected and accumulated over the last few months with the help of the museum team from local sites. It is a work created by us together.

This work is closely connected with its surroundings and everyone involved. It has been an interactive experience evoking memories of their everyday environments. All the steel bars used in the larger piece were sourced from demolished residential buildings. When a building is demolished, the way things normally work is the steel bars in the site would be removed and recycled as metal waste. What I did here was recycle the deformed steel bars from the demolition sites. I wanted to keep their existing shapes and make them part of my sculpture.

Those ruins come from our everyday lives, making up the history of the entire city or memories of individuals. I want to get people thinking about our lives and the reality we live in and looking at things that are not entirely new or polished to consider what they mean to us and our lives.