soliloquy

For me, pessimistic theories have always appeared so profound.

In such a complicated world, life seems so fragile, it is almost fragile up to the absurd. Living beings are so mean and pessimistic regarding the vast world.
Sometimes you cannot judge if life is worth living and you get caught in contradiction and chaos.
Existence is absurd, and death is real.
Joy is meaningless and suffering is real.

When life is made of suffering, then it is filled with worries and grief, isolation, helplessness, loneliness, indecisiveness and vicissitudes... I want to shake off this abnormal state and get rid of it, I want to get my good mood and clear head back, and let the desire of life fill my empty soul. Upon that I started to try and record these episodes of worry and grief. I chopped up periods of time to freeze the moment.

Perhaps due to our helplessness and resistance when facing death, I attempted to find a way to pursue eternal life, although I know that death is eternal. I cannot change the world. I come to realize, piously and with a newborn¡¯s heart, that, among the fragments of my torn and disintegrated life, there is only this turbid world in which I wander aimlessly without settling down.

In the course of this devout process, I seemed to have abandoned the so-called "artistic feeling for beauty"and this record became the tool of my thinking or the expression of my innermost feelings, which are this aimless wander through a monologue with loneliness and helplessness. Maybe my works show something more absurd than real-life : a person, a dog, a group... They are all telling stories of loneliness and helplessness. Even the air is made of the color of desolation, scarified. How can it be that not everybody feels this pain, the frailty of life and this lack of convictions? Event bright and warm colors cannot soothe this frail life, cannot soothe the desolation, long ago deep-rooted in the depth of my soul.

With the understanding that each person¡¯s life has its own meaning or purpose, I wish I live for Love. Perhaps we don't need to ask the meaning of life, we should simply admit everything that nature entails and welcome joy as well as grief, dissociate reality from life and embrace life closely!


Suspect on Existential Modalities
¡ª On Xiaochuan's Photography of Simulacra

This set of social modality images created by Xiaochuan directly makes a social pathological proposition. The patient's clothing is the symbol of the social treatment. Its blue strip pattern already is the carrier of some powerful dominating force, which first of all passes the chilling social stateliness behind it to the readers' vision, and divides the relationships of the whole social system. It itself becomes a hint, a metaphor, which regulates the wearers' social existing form. So, these social modalities' visual simulacra become a graphic thinking. What it is telling exceeds the modalities it simulates. The groups of people in the patient's clothes are the people from our hometowns that look familiar to us. They deduct a state in the time dimensions. They go cross the historical countryside in the changing space, completely simulate the rational disciplinary symbols in the urbanization, and form the silent fables.    

But these patient's clothes also have a unified power. No matter what social status these patients have, there is only an absolute social power left once this symbol covers the bodies. No matter how the wearers exist, they can not escape the regulations by the strong power. When these wearers are placed in different country environments, the creator's dimensional positions will also be dexterously encoded. This is the desire wanting to go back to the original nature from the alienation of living in the cities. But the city curing function of the patient's clothes is cleared up by the plain and simple countryside. The social expressing symbol they have is lost completely. But the suspects on self-existence are fully shown through building the simulacra of the patient's clothes. The patient's clothes' walking in the countryside and the nature greatly questions the various relationships in the social modalities.

The natural emotional expressions contain the endless malposition and absurdity. Yes or No becomes the firstly suspected question. In fact, these malpositioned patient's clothes are never part of the nature. On the contrary, they are the symbol of the constraint. "What are being constrained are not the symbols but the powers. The only important ritual is the practice. ..This model means a continuous and persistent constraint. It monitors the procedures of the activities, not the results."(Michel Foucault: "Discipline and Punishment", the Joint Publishing version, page 155). To some extend, it is a common mechanism at the moment. The external prosperity can not cover the panic in the deep side; therefore a historical absurdity is produced. Simulacra, being the artistic method, successfully present its deconstructional intention here.

Based on this, Xiaochuan's social simulacra photographing makes the biggest visual challenge, installing an metaphysical eye to the photographic images ¡ª the language of art, to make it go beyond the detailed scene shooting or the actual snap shots, and present the artist and the social situational images behind it in perspective. Its internal conceptual thoughts would become the self-imagination and the psychological cast of the social objects.

Wang Chunchen is art critic, Ph.D. of the History of Art, works in China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing