Jiang Zhi: The Man Who Carved the Boat

This is an excerpt from the curatorial research essay “A Star Cluster without an End of Construct,” written by curator Wang You for Jiang Zhi’s solo exhibition The Man Who Carved the Boat.

Since the nineteenth century, modern art museums have established a “normative” system of public display-viewing with their pure, bright and neutral spatial configurations, where different types of artistic practice could be presented as “works” in a sanctuary-like space. Years later, as we have seen, consumer culture, including cyberculture, assimilated and alienated this scenario toward a “smooth” space that allows for active enjoyment and accessibility.

The display itself is packaged with the viewer’s body for re-presentation under the transliteration of the online medium. The “viewing system,” while performing this separation, is also pierced into the cavity of the social interface, accompanying the “intimacy” of the work with the viewer, dissolving the meaning of the viewer’s gaze and reflection. If visual pressure is separated from direct tactile and dynamic pressure, will it work to change these moods? The premise is that a new extension establishes a new balance in all human perceptions and faculties, creating what we might call “new perspectives,” “new attitudes” and even “new preferences.”

It is hoped that Jiang Zhi’s solo exhibition, The Man Who Carved the Boat, will attempt to change the exhibition space in such a way that “viewing” takes on a new appearance and constitutes a new exhibition concept, creating a tunnel in the exhibition universe, reconstructing “viewing” by reducing the space of the viewer’s body and dimming the brightness. The act of looking. Here, too, electric lighting, as an extension of the human faculty, provides us with one of the clearest illustrations of how our perception has been altered: the Earth’s ancestors acted like cosmic organs, using the body’s functions as a form of participation in the forces of the universe. The darkness of night limits the horizon behaviour but opens the action of projecting the gaze towards the stars, and of course reinforces the meaning of the stars as objects.

Tentatively, one could claim that the viewer is placed in an exhibition universe—a concrete incarnation of faces, words, fairy tales and longings. Its form perhaps needs to be embedded in a recurring reproduction of the cosmic order in bodily organs and social extensions. In this installation that calls for viewing, the viewer cannot approach the work, but can enter it. A straight fish line of gaze jumps from the eye directly to the intention.

Curation establish a relationship between the gaze and the specific object under consideration. Not a forced relationship, but a relationship that is as loose as a star, yet connected. The stars are independent of each other, but they form a whole constellation, and it is this relationship between them that guarantees the independence and authenticity of each star, and thus allows for an immeasurable gravitational force and tension with the other stars, revealing their equal juxtaposition, their mutual metaphorical and allegorical relationship, their mutual attraction and influence, their mutual clash and struggle, but They are not relations of mutual compromise, or annexation.

Moreover, The Man Who Carved the Boat aims to preserve the value of memory and prevent historical memory from being lost to time. It collects the fleeting moments, like the electric light, that might otherwise be forgotten and extinguished, and presents them in a chaotic, scattered juxtaposition between various things. Jiang Zhi tries to resist the dissipation and destruction of memory in the collection of a moment. Collecting the electric light of a moment is not about restoring an ordered time, but more inclined to believe in a collage of time that is embodied in a chaotic, scattered juxtaposition between various things. A static, ordered time cannot be oriented towards the particular state of the past coalescing in a focal point, but instead becomes indifferent to the fate of the present time, and is unable to perceive the electric light signalling through memory to the present, releasing more semantic potential.

However, the exhibition does not expect the elements or events in the works to embody what they directly express (such as the adventurous puppet, the burning flower or the weeping starlet); rather, the connections themselves form a network or space within which the ever-changing elements are equally situated and do not have a particular centre. Just like the stars within each constellation, which together form the image of the constellation, no one star is more important than the others. It is also in this sense that the constellation composition of the exhibition, which is de-systematic, focuses on the specificity of any given work. This relationship between the works forms a force field on which the viewer builds, activating the qualities and dynamics inherent in itself through the interactive exchange and complementarity between the various parts of the exhibition. At the same time, when this mode of composition appears to be essentially a language, it becomes a form of reproduction that does not define concepts, but gives them new meaning by placing the concepts surrounding a thing in relationship.

In the exhibition, The Man Who Carved the Boat is not treated as an isolated object, let alone a sum; rather, it is placed as a unit within a force field that emphasises the interconnection and interaction with other concepts, an object as a free and open process. As an anti-system, the spatial character of the exhibition can explain the non-linear tensions between its components, thinking of non-identity in terms of the construction of a force field, an unfixed and peaceful co-existence established between historical individuals. It is hoped that this model will liberate the idea of exhibition from fixed paradigms and open up a range of possibilities. For example, a movement constituted by interactive relationships, an act of viewing that constantly renews its own field of meaning, a safe with an infinite number of keys, a constellation of stars without a constructed end.