Everything is Perfect 1
Everything is Perfect 2
Everything is Perfect 3
Everything is Perfect 4
Everything is Perfect 5
Everything is Perfect 6
By: Claudia Albertini
One of China’s most important video artists, winner of the Chinese Contemporary Art Award from the Chinese Contemporary Art Association in 2000, Jiang Zhi reflects on various aspects of modern China’s turbulent society, from the estrangement of individual existence to the hectic pace of our social lives.
In an early video, Fly, Fly (1997), he films a hand mimicking the flapping wings of a bird in a cramped city apartment. Confined in a small room, one feels subjugated to the self and to everything around; at the same time, one experiences tranquility, fantasies, boredom, and passion—all ways of transcending reality and escaping, just like flying. “Can we shake off heaviness for lightness?” asks the artist. “In which direction we shall choose to fly?” In Jiang’s work, reality often mingles with dreams. In Things Would Turn Simpler Once They Happened (2006), people whose lives seem to be directed by external forces are waiting to be rescued from the humdrum repetition of the everyday. “In this age of changes, people expect something to happen, something that throws light on them like a spotlight. Everything then will become simpler,” Jiang says.
Things Would Turn Nails Once They Happened (2007) shows the stunning image of an old house surrounded by new development, a symbol of the atrocious consequences of destruction and reconstruction. Dingzi hu in Chinese means “nail house,” and is popular parlance for those households determined to resist displacement directives. This work captures a real house, whose owners are trying to resist the momentum of modernization. The video installation Onward! Onward! Onward! (2006) depicts Chinese leaders Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin, running, one after the other. Their action of endless moving depicts faith in progress, summed up in the popular slogan, “ As long as we are running we are always advancing,” while emphasizing that the concept of fate is deeply rooted in this society. The installation I Am Your Poetry (2006-2007) marks a new stage in the artist’s development: comparing the works that make up this series to the verses of a poem, Jiang explores the theme of skin—a layer, a container in which our essence lies, which mutates with the passing of time. Skin represents something passing, changing, and fading away.
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我是你的詩歌 第6號 我覺得，你仍然懷著敵意
I’m Your Poetry NO.6 __Somehow, I can still feel your hostility
2007
材料：鐵，矽膠，羊毛，玻璃，日光燈管
尺寸：248釐米高，170釐米寬 45釐米厚
件數：1
Medium: Iron, Silica Gel, Wool, Glass, Neon Lamps
Height: 248cm, Width: 170cm, Thickness: 45cm
Edition: 1
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我是你的诗歌 第5号——脱衣舞娘
I Am Your Poetry NO.5 – Strip Dancer
材料：硅胶、羊毛丝、钢丝、油漆、玻璃钢、透明树脂
Material: silicon, sheep’s wool, steel wires, paint, fiberglass, transparent resin.
Images of the incessant entanglement of desire and flesh
About Jiang Zhi’s I Am Your Poetry NO.5 – Strip Dancer
By David
Though Jiang Zhi has been exploring different themes, the way in which desire changes peoples’ in body and spirit is his focus. His earliest photography work Object in Drawer（1997）, a description of personal objects and bleeding limbs, expressed a sense of despair and pain produced by the flowing of time and the recollection of the past. When the artist arrived in Shenzhen, he had to confront a materialistic society. He then decided to shoot a pretty girl in a sumptuous but anonymous room cutting her toenails and fingernails. What terrified the viewer was that the floor was completely covered with severed toes. This surreal vision reflected the world of city women living in a typical metropolis like Shenzhen, their materialistic desires and suffering souls, an emblematic issue caused by China’s social changes and high speed urbanization.
Not long after this work, Jiang Zhi installed in Shenzhen’s famous expatriot district his work “Consolation Hole”, attempting to bring consolation to the stressed foreigners living there. In 2003 he created the photography installation Sucker, portraying a new kind of humanity endowed with long sucking tubes. In this work the sucking tubes symbolize desire. He later shot a film using with both fictional and documentary tones, which was presented as a video installation in the 2005 Guangzhou Biennial. One part of this video recorded a real and frightening sex-change operation, documenting changes of the body caused by desire as well as spiritual torment. The work Rainbow, produced in 2006, consists of a series of shots in which the artist portrays an urban landscape characterized by a dream-like rainbow made of different neon lights which are often seen in Asian cities. This demonstrates the way in which material desires have eroded people’s ideals in life. The
video installation Onward! Onward! Onward! questions the one way direction adopted by national politics and economy, which at the same time represents the only way national desire can be conveyed.
During the last year, Jiang Zhi has been experimenting with silicon. He created I Am Your Poetry No.5 Strip Dancer for the exhibition “Negative Reactions” at the Shanghai Gallery of Art – the bare naked flesh displayed in his work, is not sexual at all. This layer of “skin” has been molded from an old Ford Victoria model often used in the US Police Force. Before doing this, the artist thought of describing a story about a traffic collision, a story about sin and violence, a kind of continuous entanglement of city, desire, sin, and flesh. No longer a functional object, but an organic body, suppressed by the eternal attacks of the outside world. If we were to psycoanalyse our daily lives we will be able to see that violence is like an open wound, unable to heal.
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我是你的诗歌 第一号 榴莲少女
I am your poetry No.1 “Durian Girl”
2007
材料：硅胶，红色羊毛丝，木，日光灯，有机玻璃。
179.5cm X 199.5cm X 55cm
Medium: silica gel, red wool fibers, wood, fluorescent lamp, glass.
Size: 179.5cm X 199.5cm X 55cm
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无眠 之一
Sleepless NO.1
Medium: C-Print 2007
4 images in total
Size: 125cm X 125cm （ Diameter）
无眠 之二
Sleepless NO.2
无眠 之三
Sleepless NO.3
无眠 之四
Sleepless NO.4
No Sleep
Body is moving and being carved traces in the long time solidified as metal;
as if a pebble is thrown into the lake,
one moment killing the last moment;
one trace covering the last trace.
While night is young.
无眠
在漫长的、凝固为金属的时间内部，
身体运动着，铸刻痕迹。
像石子被掷入湖面，
一个时刻，抹杀了前一个时刻；
一个轨迹，覆盖了前一个轨迹。
而夜，正年轻。
《白色之上 之一》ABOVE THE WHITE No.1 C-Print 2007 Size:150 x 210 cm
《白色之上 之二》ABOVE THE WHITE No.2 C-Print 2007 Size:150 x 210 cm
《白色之上 之三》ABOVE THE WHITE No.3 C-Print 2007 Size:150 x 210 cm
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角 corner
C-Print 2007 Size:100X100cm
There’s no other place to go except corner.
Two surfaces meet here.
There are no less competition and calculation between them.
Life, life.
This game is more like an invalid jailbreak.
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命 之一 Fate No.1 C-Print 2007 Size: 180X140cm
命 之二 Fate No.2 C-Print 2007 Size: 180X140cm
命 之三 Fate No.3 C-Print 2007 Size: 180X140cm
命 之四 Fate No.4 C-Print 2007 Size: 180X140cm
Strong tension between tow bodies. Finally, they give up their faces and accept the symbiosis. Being together is their fate.
It’s also predestined for anybody who tries to get rid of it and fails.
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