Babe Sculpture, 2013 Rubber, human hair, pigment Size: 18 x 12 x 8 cm each
A certain significant, influential idea of becoming, one is tempted to say, blurs the edge of things. Once becoming – me becoming you, interiority becoming exteriority, et cetera – becomes easy and casual, one can no longer be as certain about what marks the edge that separates a this from a that. However, it is evident in Zhu Tian’s practices that especially in a time as such one has to still strive for identifying and encountering the edge of things – the edge that differentiates one from her surrounding, and the terrestrial from the unknown, the chaotic.
Cling To A Curator (work in progress)Performance for Photograph, 2015
What could be the act appropriate to the edge? In other words, how could one deal with the edge, if we can provisionally take the edge as a given, leave it as it is, afar and dangerous – albeit we are heading exactly towards this edge – therefore also freeing ourselves from further ontological investigations into the nature of the edge? Perhaps, one should start with staring at it in the face as an infant, re-staging our originary performance in the mirror stage, when it is first determined with childish surprise or amazement that we are in fact marked by and as difference. A certain strand of Psychoanalysis showed us this crucial moment through which one no longer is all – or one is no longer one – but is therefore rendered on the spot vulnerable, surrounded by edge of things, innumerable, sharp, deadly, protected only by, curiously, one’s own edge. Enviable are those with analgesia.
Mother Died Today. Or Maybe Yesterday, I Don’t Know Installation,
2015 Inspired by The Stranger by Albert Camus
Then, the learned, cultivated insensitivity or the persistent, brave or unwise curiosity pushes one to approach the edge, to be stepping on it and start dancing. The outside limit of things termed and defined as edge is, for a certain community of figures known for their belief in immense uncertainties, what is centralised and made pivotal, attractive, deserving of one’s life. With the motif of the edge in mind, the famous dichotomy of the originary strand of Psychoanalysis is here transformed into a marriage of death drive with Eros: love object is here the death drive. By embracing the edge one is to be split into half, and through this separation from oneself she also is freed from herself, from her destiny of a singular death.
Dear BossKinetic Installation, 2014
Zhu Tian is fascinated with the edge. She inscribes a brief history of the formation and development of the edge of herself, by re-appropriating or indeed re-staging movements toward or around the edge that happen in the realm of the social. Through her re-staging, the actions – social actions challenging the limit of the terrestrial, or scientific endeavours investigating the unknown realm of the cosmic et cetera – are effectively re-contextualised, raising further speculations regarding the potential and possibility of the human being on a peculiarly individual level.
