我是你的诗歌 第5号——脱衣舞娘 I Am Your Poetry NO.5 – Strip Dancer
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.