Escape from "after the post" , destination rather than path

Writed by Lin Haotian|WUDA WUDA - Curator

A chaotic and leaderless force churns on the wilderness. Within this discourse system that emphasizes the "individual," the "individual" itself is ironically flattened the most.

Contemporary art emerged in precisely such a soil, where it was immediately swept into the currents of critique and resistance, placed in a utilitarian position, treated more as material than object, with artists themselves caught up within. In this milieu, all processes themselves, and those possibilities serving as ends, are continually marginalized within a macro context. For instance, within the mainstream, one can trace back to earlier times, from the ceiling paintings of the Sistine Chapel to the aestheticism complying with the late politics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from Manet's support for the opposition to the echoes of industrial production in Kandinsky and Bauhaus, from the frescoes in Roman churches to the Rococo of the Palace of Versailles, the transfer of ecclesiastical and royal authority, the transformation of modes of production, the future light of farsightedness. The gods of the past and emerging ones nurtured their spokesmen in the wilderness of artistic genesis, each collision and tremor shaping the landscape of contemporary culture.

Throughout this process, the consistent theme is the struggle for discursive power, the multidimensional confrontation between central discourse systems and other discourse systems, while the creative act passively serves as material, or plunges into, or is ensnared by various narratives.

On this dimension, the surface manifestation of the alienation of the art system is the alienation of marginal discourses, but its fundamental structure is the alienation of the struggle for discursive power itself for both content producers and consumers. In this process, relatively closed discourse systems gradually take shape, akin to luxury brands shaping their followers for the audience - "only truly educated people understand how to appreciate xxx's work" "how come you don't even understand this."

Yet on another level, the creative individual inevitably transcends discourse systems, while discourse systems precisely cannot transcend. Art education, as a construction of discourse systems, inevitably has its purpose and judgment systems, but the transcendent nature of creative acts cannot be ignored in this process. Forcing individual creative acts into judgment systems highlights the contradictions inherent in this process.

The struggle for artistic discourse power is like a vast net spanning ideologies and markets, shrouding every participant with education and interests, language is the source of violence, when we use its ways to understand and narrate, we are already in a state of closure, even if openness and diversity are held high here.

To breathe amidst the quagmire of the struggle for discursive power, I attempt to reconsider the meaning of creative acts within the pre-existing discourse system, setting aside the mystery of the term "art" as a signifier, directing attention towards the value of creative acts beyond being tools and materials in the struggle for discursive power, after all, from what I know, the vast majority of creators start creating out of a need for expression.

The construction of subjectivity needs the mirror of others; it is the flow of information between subjects that tells us who we are. External expression is like bats emitting sonar waves, determining their own position through the echoes reflected from others. Creative expression carries more weight of one's own life compared to rational or everyday expressions, like a leap in walking. Here, I will tell you who I am, and you will tell me: who I am.

This exhibition will elucidate the possibility of art life as an end rather than a path through two parts. The first part focuses on rational narrative works that articulate concepts to the audience (also referred to as the contemporary part, given the multitude of contemporary definitions to the extent that it becomes a sensation), while the works in the second part tend more towards the inner self of the creator. It is precisely between the differences in the two major sections, between the differences in the objects of attention, between the differences in methodologies, that the door to the possibility of art life begins to reveal its tip of the iceberg.