KS: What about this year’s solo show in Shanghai, Who is Alone Now Will Stay Alone Forever?
HA: That was inspired by a line from a poem by [Rainer Maria] Rilke. I used it to establish an emotional atmosphere. Most educated people have read Rilke, especially college students, but these works in the exhibition also made use of existing elements on site. The form of the patch of oil covering the floor was determined by visible scars of the building structure. This had some relation to the format used for the [2011] Tang Gallery show, I am Curious Yellow, I am Curious Blue.
All the elements that visitors could see within the space, including textures on the floor, were created by me — like composing a painting. It felt like being in a ruin. Looking back, I have always tried to create some kind of an atmosphere in a space. I work from my own emotional state, and try to translate or transpose that personal mood into a public one, or to give it a social context.
Missing You had some relation to the [photo-based work] Fifteen Reasons for Fashion, which was also inspired by my day job. I had just moved to Beijing and was working in an advertising company doing design work. It was a natural [visual) progression [to bring the imagery from the design culture world] into my art: working with it every day made me very familiar with this type of image and language. It was surprising how satisfying it was to use it in art that first time. It worked out really well for Missing You, which led me to continue in this fashion in works that followed. At the same time, I was always trying new materials. But whatever I tried, I kept returning to “light.” I was really fascinated by it. Still am really, as you will see in the new piece I will present at the Guangzhou Triennial in September. I insisted on doing a piece related to light [in direct relation to an object]. I will use a line from the Bible… I can’t tell you more than that as the organisers asked me to keep it secret until the event, but it’s a work I am very pleased with.
KS: Through the twelve years since 2000, can you talk about any works which represent breakthrough points in your career?
HA: Missing You for Shenzhen was definitely one. It took me five years to digest what I had learned in that process. During that time I did lots of experiments, with photography, sculpture, etc. In the course of experimenting, it was like learning anew. As I said, I had no idea what installation meant, but that was a good thing as it allowed me to use any kind of material or media in any form. In the end, I realized that installation is not a visual language per se; it’s a way of processing thoughts. You have to establish your own world view. At the end of those five years, in 2005 I participated in an exhibition curated by Wang Jianwei in Shanghai.
That exhibition, Interval, [Hi-Shanghai Creation Loft, Yangpu District] was held in an office building in a small compound. All the works produced were collaborations between an artist and an architect [He An worked with the architect Wang Hui]. In the course of discussing the project I discovered a particular interest in words/text, not just their form. You can see by the fact that the titles of all of my works are long, deliberately so. The work we produced was titled 1mm. Wang Hui used 1mm-thick steel wires; I used ants. The words created by the ants [Note: He An sprinkled sugar solution in the formation of the text; when the ants were drawn to the areas marked out by the solution, so the words were given form through the dense mass of the ants’ body] came from the internet language [Note: the log of a conversation held in a chat room] that I used to flirt with girls online.
When I gave the proposal to Wang Jianwei, he liked it very much. It was only after it was done, that he told me other artists had used ants in their work. He said he didn’t bring it up because he felt I needed to transcend the impact of Missing You; that the first step to achieving this was there in 1mm.
After that, in 2006, I began working with neon text; you know, like the neon installation project we did in Birmingham in 2008 [Note: this was titled “I talked to Ah Chang on the way to work. After work I ended the relationship, I stood by Paradise Circus and cried for hours…”, and was a sixty-meter-long neon installation located on the roof of a car park in the center of Birmingham that was produced as a special commission for the China Now festival in the UK, facilitated by Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery]. That’s really when I began to think deeply about direction and approach. From 2000 to 2005, I was learning anew. Then from 2005 I found an approximate direction. An artist’s agenda cannot be too precise or fixed. The more precise it is, the worse the artist is. But you need to have a thinking model and direction. In my view, the first neon [which was done in 2006 in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, again curated by Wang Jianwei. It took the form of the text “I ownership and possession” and “An instant of my purity is worth a lifetime of your lies…”] was also one of my more successful pieces.
In that sense it is similar to Missing You. You could put Missing You anywhere in China and it would work. It’s the same with all the text works.
In 2007 I started to give serious thought as to how to transcend Missing You. It took about a year [to complete the next work] which was Stolen Words. It needed 70 characters in total. To acquire them took ages and much money at a time when I had little to spend. [Note: this work comprised a sentence from the Internet “Brother, please can you help her?” It was He An’s goal to acquire all the individual characters needed by having people steal them from the public realm, wherever, however.] In 2008, I was able to show Stolen Words for the first time.
KS: It has also been shown in other spaces [it was first shown at T-Space when Fu Xiaodong was there; then at Pace in the performance exhibition], but in the process of showing it, was the history of its origins, that of the individual characters, made public?
HA: It’s public now.
KS: So it’s ok to talk about it?
