Background Material: 今夜我为何物 / Tonight I Will Consider That Which I Am (2008)
Artist: 王郁洋 Wang Yuyang
« Back to 今夜我为何物 / Tonight I Will Consider That Which I Am (2008)
Text 1 (author: Li Zhenhua)
策划人说明
中国从80年代抽象艺术展被封，经历了从具像美术／表现主义／抽象艺术等等过程，这件作品脱离了表面的中国符号，逐渐将抽象主义/极简主义与观念艺术设置在一个与环境有关的氛围中，月亮在王郁洋以前的作品《登月计划》2006中是一个被怀疑的事件，当月亮的形象被抽离，放置在一个可被触摸的距离，将诸多隐喻融入环境逐渐变强的光之中。
新作品《今晚我将考虑我是何物》转化了来自亨利 米勒对应尼采的哲论：“成为你自己!你现在所做的一切，所想的一切，所追求的一切，都不是你自己。”(《尼采四卷本著作》，德文版，第3卷，75页，德国山地出版社，1985。译注。)他在《黑色的春天》一书最后说：“今晚我愿意想一个人，一个孤独的人，一个没有姓名、没有祖国的人，一个我所尊敬的人，因为他和你绝无共同之处这便是我自己。今晚我将考虑我是何物。”
Curator’s words
Since the 80s when abstract art was discredited, Chinese art went through periods of representational, expressionist and abstract art (again) etc. ‘Artificial Moon’ has departed from clichéd Chinese symbolism, and sets abstraction, minimalism and conceptualism in the same environment, that of reality. The moon was the subject which the artist addressed in a previous piece: ‘The Moon Landing Programme’ (2006) which questioned this event. When the form of the moon has been re-contextualized, and is placed within touching distance, all the existing metaphors are blended into an environment of pulsing light.
Wang Yuyang’s new work ‘Tonight I Will Consider That Which I Am’ transforms what Henry Miller had commented on Nietzsche: “Be yourself! All you are doing, thinking and pursuing now are not yourself.” In the final part of the Black Spring, he says: “Tonight I would like to think of a person who is lonely, nameless, without his motherland, but a person whom I respect because he’s utmost different from you—it is myself. Tonight, I will consider that which I am.”
Text 2 (author: Edward Sanderson)
Tonight I Will Consider That Which I Am…
A lone astronaut surveys the wreckage of his landing craft, his link to home floating in pieces all around him. The environment is chilled and pitch black, with a faint breeze perceptible, causing some small movement in the elements. In amongst the destruction, a piercing blue flame shows.
The installation takes elements from a previous work by Wang Yuyang, ‘Moon-Landing Programme’, which investigated the nature of truth and belief through the media representations of the Apollo moon landings. The landing craft and astronauts served as participants in the studio recreation of this event, the first steps on the moon by American astronauts. They now live on in Who am I tonight? only to find themselves cast in another story, one which presents some sort of accident having taken place, perhaps on the return journey to Earth, exploding the craft and stranding the returning astronaut.
Earth and Sky
The landing craft serves as a mini-Earth, it’s metal and plastic structure is a system for sustaining life. Within acceptable tolerances it duplicates the essential elements required to promote life, an optimum mixture of gases for a breathable atmosphere, the ideal pressure to keep a human in one piece, the right temperature and amount of light, not just for survival, but something more, something like comfort.
Just like the landing craft, the astronaut’s suit performs a similar function, but in a much more compressed area, it is a portable Earth. The liveable environment is now comprised of a thin pressurised region of air, at most a few centimetres thick around the body, with associated life-giving functions relegated to a box carried outside the suit.
In the installation, the suit and the landing craft perform the function of connection, providing the link between space and earth. They do not bring them together, but hold them in relation to each other, a tense arrangement.
Who am I?
The suit and the landing craft serve as idealised environments for a human body, and as such have meaning by performing their actions successfully.
The ‘I’ of the title has a broader meaning than that of just the astronaut taking part in the scene, or of us as the viewer of this little event. The artist is keying into the aspect of Chinese culture which understand any object as invested with an ‘I’-ness. This takes it away from strands of discourse which make a distinction between the human (displaying reason and hence the ability for a behaviour which could be called ‘moral’) and everything else (which is somehow lacking in this).
Looking at the piece in this way the artist suggests that the possibility of an environment supporting human life somehow defines the nature of the object, and gives it it’s possibility of being – being in this sense as tied to the possibility of human life, a moral being perhaps which allows us to understand the craft as performing a duty towards it’s human cargo.
Flame
The welding flame suggests the possibility of reconstruction, of recreating our home environment.
The blue flame provides the source of potential movement out of this situation, some form of progress and resolution. The flame is a welding torch, hence the overpowering brightness of the spot of light, it can cut, but it can also weld together, connect the metal of the landing craft back together, to allow for the possibility of recreating the human environment and thus restoring some kind of balance between inside and outside.
The flame acts as attractor for the elements of the installation, both the remains of the landing craft with it’s possibility of reconstruction, and the astronaut, as a bright point of hope from which to give purpose and meaning back to the craft.