Scripts, Traces, and the Unpredictable

In the first gallery was Wu Chao’s dimly projected video, What Does Consciousness Look Like (2016). It shows a series of poetic episodes: blurry views of meadow flowers, followed by prosaic images of city life, yielding to a tranquil veil of darkness. As a meditation on the titular question, it is indecisive; perhaps the flowers suggest a seedbed where ideas germinate. Without proposing an answer, the sequence suggests the impenetrability and mystery of other minds. Wu’s interest in consciousness—which has led her to work in art therapy for comatose patients—is acknowledged in a plain A3 sheet posted on the wall. Headlined “Wu Chao Statement,” it is a chronology commingling Wu’s artistic endeavors with terse non-sequiturs such as “Was not satisfied with reality” and “began cleansing and energizing my inner self,” implying psychic equilibrium as her greater aim. 

A large unstretched canvas is spread across a table in another of Wu’s contributions. Entitled Map of the Vitality Research Community (2017– ), implying a cheery collaborative project, the work presents unfathomable and occasionally disturbing encounters, embroidered and painted onto the canvas. In one, a green humanoid figure drags along a box containing a naked corpse, followed by an anthropomorphic, clothed reindeer. Such vignettes are caught in strokes of blue paint that in some places form trees but remain abstract whirlpools elsewhere, hinting at states of mental isolation and chaos. A skein of yarns is abandoned on the canvas, as if affirming that the work is still in progress. 

Any sense of closure was consistently withheld throughout the exhibition. In Zhang Jianjun’s performance, documented in the video Vestiges of a Process: Qian Zi Wen (2017), participants painted characters from the Liang Dynasty poem “Thousand Character Text” directly onto the walls and floor of the gallery. Simultaneously, the artist obliterates parts with layers of white paint. The video was shown on a monitor in the space where the action took place, producing a ghostly effect­—the walls had been restored to pristine white, purging every trace of the filmed event. 

Creative schemes also lead to a blank in Mu Xue’s Partial Sketch of a Childish Nothingness (2008), a collection of plans, stuffed into cheap plastic sleeves and bound together in three ring binders, each portentously exhibited on a plinth. The materials fall into vague categories: photographs, some cut up, of assorted sculptural works that appear to have been accidentally broken; crumpled papers with doodle-filled margins; and unfinished projects, represented in scruffy notes and diagrams. The work suggests the many preparations that the artist has never followed through on, provoking continuous fresh starts. 

Projected in a nearby alcove, Boo Junfeng’s film Parting (2015) initially draws the viewer into a man’s unsuccessful search for his long-lost love. The cinematic illusion is ruptured when he stumbles upon a crew shooting a farewell scene at the railway station. Seeing the paraphernalia of movie production reminds us that the man, too, is acting. This is further evidenced by the presence of the script and, on three monitors, alternate takes of the parting scene, displayed next to the projection as a separate installation titled The Scene at the Train Station (2016). Audiences thus find that what they witnessed was one of several inflected alternatives.