Opening
March 27 at 5 PM, 2021
Duration
March 27 till April 25, 2021
Location
CEAC, Xiamen, China
Artist
My work observes the process of making something, and the minor difference during the repetitive process. This time it is about the creativity the mindful students have while they forget the correct answers during the examinations.
I mostly work with video, performance, installation and drawing.
When I was young, I was always against transcribing. The first reason is I couldn’t write the mechanical typing style letters. I also hated following the construction of writing. Sometimes my mom had to help me with my transcribing homework as I was extremely slow.
But maybe once you have the freedom, you might choose something you escaped from. While creating my artwork, I found myself sometimes do the transcribing thing.
Sometimes I drew my moving shadow; sometimes I tried to repair a broken letter; and sometimes I cooked all the words as soup, once I even transcribed the reflection in my footbath.
Recently, while sitting next to my mom who teaches mandarin and was correcting the examination papers, I was gradually lost in the different fantastic wrong answers: there was something wrong in these sentences, but they certainly looked like a piece of poetry.
Wrong poetry is still poetry, and what’s right and wrong? Going beyond all the wrong answers, I can feel the energy of creativity.
What’s the “wrong answer”? Humans are always correcting themselves and redefine the “right” — a man is just a thinking reed.
In the mean time, I feel sorry for these poetries, as nobody would appreciate these messy pieces, including the creators: students who study hard will go for the right answer; and the one who is not interested in study, would mostly forget the examine as soon as possible.
So I start my transcribing task again, only me, but perhaps this time it could be a little bit fun.