randian | 燃点

Don’t be taken in by the fancy terms though. Rehberger always wants you to look for the errors and the dissonances that allow us to ‘hack’ the system, to get inside. The glitches are revealing, if only you look.

Thus, Why Only Art Can Saves Us, is a philosophical, political, and existential reflection on the appeal and aesthetic qualities of art in the 21st century.

In the process, you go somewhere and somelsewhere elastically, even a tiny bit. While inhabiting a ritual, one lives in and through time, via an odd interval sliced open and stitched back together.

The last two decades of precipitous change have provided much grist for recent exhibitions, artist talks, and essays. The pre-eminence of digital technologies in society, the unpredictable advances in biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence, and irreversible environmental degradation encapsulated under the banner of the Anthropocene all speak to a certain disquiet towards unproblematic notions of progress.

The first appearance of the ouroboros—the mythological snake that eats its own tail—appears in an ancient funerary text discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamen in 14th century BC. Across cultures, this act of autophagy has symbolized the cyclical processes of life and death, whose union can be seen formulating pre-modern conceptions of eternity.

Stepping into the exhibition, what I first noticed were two Chinese characters about a person’s height, printed in red, jumping out from the white background of the gallery. These characters provide the most distinctive visual cues in Zeng Hong’s solo exhibition “Quaderni Rossi”.

(中文) 倘若今天还能探讨美学效果而不被人嗤之以鼻，我们应从何种角度去思考艺术家的创作或创造？康德很久以前就提示过我们，任何艺术都不如一场战争或一场自然灾害那样令人震撼。战争作为人类各种暴力的集中爆发，而自然灾害是超越人类尺度的狂暴力量，两者都会造成人类难以承受的肉体和精神创伤。

(中文) 影子是关系的产物，幻影则是意识的产物，刘韡的作品是影子与幻影的重影，也是艺术家意识与工人劳作的重影。