KS: You have never been a prolific artist. As you said earlier, it took five years to digest what you learned from Missing You. There were other works produced in those five years…
HA: Yes, many: photoworks, sculpture, a sound installation in Shanghai. [He An replayed a speech by CCTV broadcaster Zhao Zhongxiang speech through a water pipe.]
KS: Although the works seem few, each one was carefully considered. But looking back are there any pieces you consider to be a failure?
HA: Many, too many! Those photoworks like Fifteen Reasons for Fashion and the “ad” works, none of them were really good. I met the girls [in Fifteen Reasons for Fashion] in bars. They were all prostitutes, a symbol of society at that time, but I think the way I used them in the work was too simple.
[He An only produced three of the initially envisaged fifteen “reasons”.]
KS: Sometimes the value of a work only becomes apparent after the fact. When you show this work in years to come, you might be surprised.
HA: I can only tell you what I feel about my work, but in that regard perhaps you are right. I haven’t given it much thought, other than it seems to me to be too simple. It is the abstract qualities of a work that I increasingly wish to highlight, not something so concrete. Before, I used to look at Cezanne, not like before. Now I enjoy the still-lifes of Morandi. That’s what I’m into now. I want to break away from a concrete thought pattern towards a social consciousness, and an attitude towards existence, towards a more abstract space.
I think my experience of society was the catalyst. When I take stock of myself today, that particular period, with things happening at home, including my family background which all made a deep impression on me, I find myself wanting to return to that moment. Looking back at the works I have made since, no matter good or bad, they all seem to be about trying to calm down, to sit down and contemplate. It goes back to my lifestyle, my family. I spent much time hanging out with friends. I kept telling them I thought my works were simple. It was like I wanted to remind myself constantly of the kind of person I was; where I came from, my social class. As If that was how I had to act as an artist. It was only by transcending those things that I could free myself. Otherwise I would be lost.
