• Prelude: The Initial Spark
Entering a space ‘related to art’ is a relatively simple matter today: in leisure time, when meeting friends, or seeking a place to let one’s thoughts wander for a moment, people easily think of venues like cinemas and museums—spaces that accommodate both activity and quietude. But while physically entering a location is easy, entering a state of feeling, consciousness, or spirit that is ‘related to art’ is never quite so simple. The commonly experienced chasm between the two is often loosely described as the ‘threshold of art’—a phrase that often carries connotations of frustration, helplessness, and disconnect. If we view this situation as a pressing problem, then when sensory content like films, operas, and exhibitions is presented to the public in embodied, physical form, should institutions not also provide a ‘convenient gateway’ linking the present moment with imagination?
The answer is, of course, yes. In fact, art is constantly evolving, attempting through various participatory formats like guided tours and workshops to establish more diverse and inclusive perspectives. Perhaps because of this, interdisciplinary frameworks from humanities, history, philosophy, geology, geography, physics, engineering, and genetics are merging with artistic concepts, images, and various forms of expression based on specific media in ever-evolving fluid forms, extending into vivid, tangible, multifaceted ‘others’. This is also, possibly, the underlying logic and internal drive of my current curatorial work: building doors and bridges.
• To the Streets
In fact, just like visiting many exhibition spaces ordinarily, my first visit to PETITREE ART was on the last day of its previous exhibition, “The Speck on the Wall is a Snail.” If you’ve also worked in the art industry for over five years, you likely share this experience: in today’s era of exceptionally developed social media, many exhibitions can be accessed online through platforms like WeChat moments and official accounts. With sufficient curiosity and patience, you can essentially grasp the entirety of an exhibition, not only about a work, but also an artist through countless images and texts hang like spiderwebs in the cyber desert, neatly woven, connected, and arranged; but attempting to enter remotely through this superficial form of browsing advertisements may ultimately lead either to being enveloped by data algorithms and information cocoons, or to falling into an infinitely chaotic void. What art must do is never simply zoom in, but rather create magnification across different dimensions as much as possible; besides, ultimately, it is a kind of life wisdom about the interconnectedness of people and all things. How can flat information be made three-dimensional and interesting? Just set off immediately, even at the last moment. Measuring the space in person through one’s own identity and perspective, witnessing the works with one’s own eyes, allows many details and affective moments to extend deeper and wider; simultaneously, randomly arising, exceptionally clear feelings and thoughts instantly replace monotonous, rigid digital impressions.
Shedding the technological phantom limb, returning to the streets, the scenery outside the car window gradually shifts from blocky buildings to old streets full of life. PETITREE ART, from its collection show, its formal debut exhibition “In the Beginning, It Was a Futile Trip,” to “The Speck on the Wall is a Snail,” first strikes me as having several obvious common keywords: globalized, young, aesthetic, and multi-media—whether based on visual works on canvas or other materials. Furthermore, another special quality develops from that tree in the airy pavilion: a Southern ethos. It is a collective creativity that thrives in corners, lingers in street dialogues, born of grassroots autonomy. To cite an example from recent exhibition practices, take the 2022 Guangdong Times Museum exhibition “Tsk-Tsk in the Streets.” It symbolically displayed methods of self-organization through works, documents, and site-specific installations, prompting audiences who seemingly went to an exhibition to instead land back in the streets, distilling a social governance technique effective on a broader scale. Two years later, how to attempt to calibrate the essence of the ‘South’ bordering Shenzhen and the self, and to anchor the effective ‘folk techniques’ of this time and place, remains a fundamental question that independent individuals working and living within this context must often face and address.
• Into Subtexts
Through the above, I have attempted, by asking institutions ‘how to make content more perceptible,’ asking workers ‘how to produce more effective knowledge,’ and asking viewers ‘can you understand information in another way,’ to map out the starting point for curating the exhibition now presented at PETITREE ART, “I Tossed a Two-Sen Coin into the Air.” I then guide one possibility among countless answers towards the point of congruence between visiting an exhibition and reading a mystery novel, concerning path and linguistic sensibility. Why seek common ground between mystery novels and curatorial methods? Because their narrative design, deductive rhythm, logic of thought, and the relative privacy of the experiencer are almost identical. Furthermore, the honkaku mystery subgenre offers a more ingenious solution by completely overlapping the viewer’s perspective with the first-person perspective of the ‘detective’ protagonist, i.e., the novelist: Why not gather the institution, the workers, and the visitors under the same person, the same actions, and the same perspective to contemplate the same objects? Thus, perhaps the three questions ultimately point to a single answer.
Discussing honkaku mysteries must begin with their acknowledged foundational figure, Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965); but curiously, Edogawa’s first mystery novel, The Two-Sen Copper Coin (1923), doesn’t strictly conform to the honkaku principle of ‘revealing the solution at the story’s end’—a point that just aligns with the freedom inherent in the exhibition experience. Thus, that golden line full of black humor and endless unknowns naturally became the opening passage of this exhibition: “Speaking, Matsumura smugly revealed his neat front teeth. I had noticed a gold tooth gleaming in his mouth for a while now. He proudly plucked out the gold tooth with his fingertip and held it before my eyes.” Without explicitly stating the true whereabouts of the lost coin, the openly revealed ‘culprit’ from the very start, the captivating plot with its repeated reversals, and the self-evident prank conclusion are all sufficient to elevate this immature work hailed as the ‘shadow of honkaku’ to literary sainthood.
The wisdom of insinuation, clues that guide or mislead through light and shadow, a relaxed and interesting narrative style and reading experience—these qualities can serve as a common foundation for the exhibition’s architecture, and they also happen to be the initial feeling I get from the works—paintings, sculptures, and video—by the four artists in this exhibition: Feng Shan, Shao Yuxuan, Wang Heng, and Zhang Yi. So, why not design this exhibition as the clue-gathering scene of an anonymous detective ‘I,’ placing the artists’ works within several reasoning spaces: study, bedroom, window, beam, even balcony, organically scattering various pieces of information throughout, waiting for people to become curious, to walk, to observe and ponder. When one accidental happens upon an incredibly exciting yet unsettling idea, new questions bubble up incessantly like boiling water, yet each one also serves as a remarkably concrete form of self-guidance and self-completion—is this not precisely the same realization shared by artists, curators, institutions, and audiences? I find it difficult to interpret the meaning or value of an artwork divorced from its specific origins and display context; therefore, let us now return together into the ‘two-sen coin’ to gather subtle yet concrete creative clues.
• Mysterious Path
Pushing the door open, an old Marathon typewriter and a line by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)—’I look, and things exist. I think and only I exist.’—trigger the start of the exhibition. People can freely fiddle with the typewriter, but the letters on the keys have all been erased—the failure of sight forces one to employ hearing, smell, touch, even intuition to assess the present; although the scene before them is exceptionally bright and clear, viewers, bereft of coordinates, feel as if in dimness. The prelude to this ‘reasoning’ is set by Shao Yuxuan’s participatory installation, the slight tension, bewilderment, and groping forward being precisely the misty atmosphere the curation intends.
Standing at a crossroads, people can choose their own route and the next zone they will enter. Ahead, a black screen work by artist Feng Shan, Floor Plan of the Bedroom, partially obscures the central negative space. If one’s gaze shifts from the small painting on the bare wall to the pencil-on-paper works on the ink-black wall panels, one can closely observe Zhang Yi’s paintings and mixed-media sculpture Fossil in this relatively intimate area. To the left is a broad zone layered with near, middle, and distant landscapes. If viewers are first drawn by the graffiti canvases hung like laundry on clothes racks and poles, they will inevitably subsequently discover Wang Heng’s ‘cabinet of curiosities’ Red Grid, with its neatly arranged assorted eggshells, a large-scale oil on canvas by Shao Yuxuan, Amon Seth, and another set of marble sculptures by Feng Shan, Forehead. In the distance, a window view reveals a vibrant expanse of green, and a question separating above from below asks: (Would you like to be) overground or underground? Alternatively, turning right, viewers can also see works by all four artists resting here in a state of mutual resonance and individual independence.
But in reality, the exhibition’s content extends far beyond this; just like reading a mystery novel, without personally plunging between the lines, pondering the clues back and forth, one cannot notice the crucial points nor experience the thrill of sudden realization. Measuring the inner and outer spaces of PETITREE ART physically, over sixty works are like over sixty clue points, appearing sometimes on relatively obvious walls and floors, sometimes swirling like ghosts on ceiling pipes, on a beam somewhere, merging with the window views, fireplace, and storage cabinets. The four artists, drawing on individual experiences from diverse backgrounds, fully extend expressive methods existing between different materials, generations, forms, and narratives, interweaving to collectively reconstruct a well-paced ‘three-dimensional novel.’ In her composite sculptures, Feng Shan not only combines multiple interrelated modules—such as cast bronze cranes, artificial marble, woodblocks, and flowers—but, more interestingly, incorporates the surrounding spatial reality, light, shadow, and stories into the (non)fictional scenes she creates. Her ongoing Clues series, begun in 2012, uses lint rollers to first collect then flatten out surface hairs, clothing fuzz, and subtle clues from living environments, creating unique portraits akin to personal DNA or databases from abstract yet concrete material fragments.
All the images and objects present are frozen here in a state of silent, relative stillness. Yet another medium, sound, lurks within black wires, tracing a loop around the larger space, sliding seventy meters before resounding again in headphones in another room. This 5-minute audio-visual work completely separates sound and image within the domain, further disassembling and reassembling the thoughts of those present, drifting to various parts of the space. Also in a state of flux are Zhang Yi’s pencil-on-drafting-paper works drawn seven years ago in London, named after the constantly changing latitude and longitude coordinates of the canal boat she resided in at the time. She releases the honkaku speculate within the misty field into a mysterious, free, undetermined multi-directional realm of thought, much like *-0.132694, 51.538377*, which, while infinitely approaching a specific real point, simultaneously gets lost again in the abstract, code-like world of numbers. Thus, the seemingly accurate appearances and familiar-seeming clues in the exhibition, after several rounds of pushing away and pulling close, ultimately see the answers hidden beneath the questions and people’s ‘methods’ of perceiving art hang in the air for a long time like the two sides of a coin, both faces revealed—comprehension or doubt, either can serve as a releasing beginning for validating effective response.
*For the Chinese Version.
*More details about the exhibition.
Yuting (Roxy) TANG 