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Thierry Liégeois, Cacography

 

LAB47 is delighted to present Thierry Liégeois’s first ever exhibition in Beijing, Cacography, a site-specific set of Expériences projet concerning alternative culture, sponsored by New Century Contemporary Art Foundation. The art practice of Liégeois mixes popular and artistic references. His creations always look like certain ironic games: it is often about the costumes and the vices of society. Whereas for him, the social criticism is never negative: it is always a pretext to humour, so that his works are extremely quirky, tricky as well as attractive.

Cacography is from Greek κακός (kakos “bad”) and γραφή (graphe “writing”). The main sense is “poor spelling, accentuation, and punctuation” or “poor handwriting”. In contemporary context, Cacography is deliberate comic misspelling, a type of humour similar to malapropism.[1] That is to say, an intent to act in an inappropriate way, antagonistical to the usual form. The Chinese character “巭孬嫑烎” is an expression, created by people who surfed the internet. It means naught if we read the whole word following a conventional approach. It makes sense only if we read them separately, and desconstruct them totally. In other words,the four characters are taken apart to eight characters—功夫不好,不要开火(without good Kungfu, don’t open fire). It evidently is a certain form of cacography in this era, funny, bantering, weird and something else. Cacography is the desire to break the rules, an impulse of escaping the routine. This deliberate wrong-writing is catharsis, an emotional disclosure as well as an overflow of self-hatred.

The purpose of wrong-ist by Liégeois is based on the artist’s experience, which is generated from his own circumstances. He believes the industrial products are playing a dominant role in our life. He feels it, thus he reshapes it, kneads it, creates sense of unanny, freaky, black humor…By all of them, it’s profound introspection.

For this exhibition, Cacography, Liégeois picks a tricycle to do his art practice. The tricycle is outmoded, but practical. It’s a diverse symbol of technological society. Meanwhile It’s a unti-mainstream culture working. Tricycle not only functions on behalf of the social division of labor, but also represents a state of living. By dismantling, assembling, welding, and remaking the tricycle, then combining it with plants, voices, electric lights. Liégeois creates a delicate tricky scene, a well overlapped new type of aesthetic experience.

This time, LAB 47 becomes a mini greenhouse, a mechanical and vibrant space. The works are monumental, which remind us of the aura and divinity that are widely covering our phenomenal world.

*Special thanks for the revision by Ellen Larson


[1] Mel Watkins, “On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor”, 1994, ISBN 0-671-68982-7, pp. 60, 62.

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