WORKS
2024
PROJECTS
5/2025 THESIS EXHIBITION, OCAD UNIVERSITY, TORONTO.
BIOGRAPHY + CONTACT
The aim of the exhibition from now on is to create an environment around the 'experience of being a student', which will consist of a limited number of 5-6 pieces/groups of work, paintings, installations, sculptures, perhaps photographs and videos, and in the most optimistic case even a book. The intention of the exhibition is already as straightforward as the title "student", I will try to explore and present the identity and experience of a student through a number of important elements. In a nutshell, this identity is a unique vantage point for a person in his early twenties to have in his youth, a clean experience, and an episode that blends between childhood and fully socialized. Even though my narrative and manipulation is highly subjective, I believe that the commonalities in the content will allow the viewer to have their own experience in the final exhibition.
Introduction
This text was written in August 2024, nine months before the final presentation of this project. I am going to introduce a flexible framework here, which will change accordingly with the substance of the final presentation. I have already determined what the structure of this framework should be, and now I am left with the task of making plans for the works, presentations, and publications. Imagine that I am presenting a rectangle now, which has two components: the frame and the filling. The filling is the independent variable, including the specific components of the work, exhibition, and publication; the frame is the dependent variable, which changes as the specific components change within the pre-set scope of the frame. In one possibility, the rectangular frame will eventually be displayed as a parallelogram. The frame points to a very broad but clear field, and I am concerned here with the “experience of being a student,” showing the complexity and uniqueness of it, rather than just a layer of identify of a “student.”
The first thing to talk about is the work. My initial idea was to design a exhibition framework around all specific works. In fact, I also had some ideas about the work first, and after a long period of exploration, I found the theme of “student” and the framework. In terms of time, the emergence of this theme is a coincidence, but its significance is by no means a purely coincidental product. The intuition that produced these works is closely related to my own experience and background as a student. I think I can describe these works as follows: they are about experience: psychological, emotional, environmental, and atmospheric; they do not care about the distinction between abstractness and concreteness of an expression, but they are related to certain factors; their perspective is general, and the display of form is greater than conveying any specific content or message. Now the school studio is closed, so I would like to use this time to solve some general problems with these works before I start working on them—what should they be and what will they look like? I started to make some sketches, do some modeling, material experiments, etc. to visualize them; I got a lot of valuable object-oriented references from these methods, which provided an opportunity to re-examine the ideas and works from a third-person perspective (I could empty my mind and look at the works and ask myself, how do they look like? Actually!?). I can remain calm, which is valuable, because I think my creative state (and probably that of almost everyone) is very personal, a kind of 'flow' - once we enter it, it is difficult to actively control when to withdraw from it. For the same reason, I don't think I am capable of making any further specific descriptions of these works beyond the scope of “a general idea.” Doing so would not be reliable, because I myself am not sure of these matters at this moment, and I don't want to provide any information here that might mislead anyone. The exhibition will contain 5-7 works, and if I can get the first-floor lecture hall of the school as the exhibition venue as planned, the entire exhibition space will be relatively empty. I have included two installation works, a group of sculptures + installation works, and several or a group of paintings, these are basically determined. In addition, there may be some photographic works and film installations, but whether or not these works will be displayed in the final exhibition, or in the exhibition hall or in a book, how and how many of these works will be displayed are all related issues that I need to arrange according to various circumstances. The dimensions and space occupied by the several works that I have listed above are relatively large, and they dominate the experience of the entire space and dominate the visual structure, creating the most direct first impression. The viewer should able to experience at least two polar or opposite experience in one dimension, for an example to explain it, the neat arrangement of things on a table and the messy arrangement of things on a table, the two convey completely different feelings. In terms of concept, each work will be partial of a collection, and each of the things in this collection that can be taken out, stand alone, and make sense as a single thing with clear boundaries. The collection of all these parts (works) is the “experience of being a student” that is ultimately conveyed.
The entrance to the lecture hall is a narrow corridor, and the interior space is quite open, with two floors and a height of at least 10 meters. The stairs extend from the first floor to the second floor. This is a typical large classroom space in any university, and its function is undoubtedly in line with my ideas. Generally speaking, the classroom has a set of lecture equipment: a huge screen, a lectern, a computer, and a set of sound equipment. I would certainly make some changes to the space, but what I would like to achieve with this space is this effect – look, you have taken a class in this room, or in this kind of environment, you have sat in this kind of chair, you have seen the teacher, and the students make presentations on the big screen… For this reason, I need to retain some of the elements of the classroom, rather than treating it as an empty space that only serves as a display for the work. But there are questions: what exactly should be preserved, the screen or the few steps? The screen is so big, should it be left empty, or should something be shown on it? Or should the steps be replaced by desks or a large conference table? Asking these questions is not for the sake of the narrative's plausibility. For me, asking these questions is a concrete content that can be adopted. It is related to what I want to convey in the exhibition. Is it more like a lesson, or after a lesson, do students just get some knowledge, or can they apply this knowledge? My thoughts lean towards the latter.
To return to the question I asked earlier, I am sure that I will complete more than 5-7 works in these 9 months, and that they will be of a wider variety. I may write some poems, make some music, some small designs, and some commercial objects. If these things are to be included in the final exhibition, I think they must be displayed separately from the works. The decision as to whether something is a work or not, and whether it should be displayed, is a complex one. But if something is considered a work by me, but is excluded from the final exhibition, and still needs to be displayed in some other way, a book or some other encompassing medium would be a good way to do it. The content of this can be used to supplement and enrich the content of the final exhibition. The content is something that is relatively secondary to the content of the exhibition, but in everyday life, where these ideas come from, it is real and essential. What is a “student”? What is the uniqueness and complexity of this? I think the objective answer to this question should be a personalized and specialized attitude. In short, it is impossible for everyone's student experience to be exactly the same. But is there a relatively common and relatively similar path? To be more specific, is every student an explorer, and after everyone's student days are over, are they not an explorer anymore? I don't think there is a clear one-way relationship here. The interconnection of single-dimensional characteristics constitutes an identity, but this identity and the other identity may include some things that are the same. My point is that the uniqueness and complexity of the “experience of being a student” is not a theory of its own. The categorization, theorization and conceptualization of it come after this experience/identity. For me, there is no need to have a complete and clear definition of these things here. Maintaining a certain degree of doubt is beneficial for exploring these experiences through art.
To conclude, I think the ratio between clarity and ambiguity in my plan can be optimistically estimated as 50:50. The situation is that I am absolutely clear about what I am going to do, but there is still a lot to be explored and solved in terms of what and how I am going to do it. However, I think this is healthy and consistent with my usual artistic process. As the famous saying goes, you can never calculate the complete picture of something until it is fully formed.