| Sanjie is a composite artwork created with three methods—oil painting, photograph and video. The subject is a young Chinese girl wearing a red scarf (the symbol of a member of Young Pioneer Group) and playing the roles of the 13 figures of da Vinci’s Last Supper. It took me nearly a year to complete the work, but the deliberation process took years before that. The oil painting was completed the first. During the Chinese New Year of 2003, I took quite a lot of pictures and stayed at home doing the painting. When the painting was done, SARS had become an epidemic. Ignoring the warnings, I went out frequently and finally completed the photograph and video part of the production in September of 2003. |  |
One Day in 2004 – Cui Xiuwen
Sanjie is a composite artwork created with three methods—oil painting, photograph and video. The subject is a young Chinese girl wearing a red scarf (the symbol of a member of Young Pioneer Group) and playing the roles of the 13 figures of da Vinci’s Last Supper. It took me nearly a year to complete the work, but the deliberation process took years before that. The oil painting was completed the first. During the Chinese New Year of 2003, I took quite a lot of pictures and stayed at home doing the painting. When the painting was done, SARS had become an epidemic. Ignoring the warnings, I went out frequently and finally completed the photograph and video part of the production in September of 2003. The red scarf and white shirt signify the period from the 50s all the way to the 70s and, indeed, these symbols remain powerful to this day.
To me, the red scarf represents a period in my memory, a mark of belonging to a certain generation, the desire to gain honor, the exciting and yet unsettling sentiment of being urged on by the martyrs who created the People’s Republic, and even more so, the doubt and the quest of identifying the relationship between the individual and the group. The white shirt was always so white, white even in dreams, and yet it also created an image that was not exactly so white and pure. The color of history is fading, people age, memory becomes vague and unreliable. In the Last Supper, people always ask which one is Judas. I believe that Judas is each and every one of us. As I grow older, I know more clearly that people can be as naïve and as simple as they want to be, and as complicated too.
Now I go back to the innocence of youth as the subject of my works. I erase the whole process of growing up and let this girl bear the consequence of history. I let her balance herself in the process of breaking up, converging, evolving and duplicating.
One Day in 2004 picks up some of the elements in Sanjie, both in external form and internal psychology. The difference is that One Day in 2004 is even harder to describe in words. She, the young girl, is now more introverted, more private, more spiritual. She continues to bear our memory, like a replay of historical images. It is as if everything had been left to memory, but, at the same time, it is hovering around us nearby. She seems to be changing and growing up around us, yet we are unaware. She is abstract and yet real. My relationship with her is unified and yet separate. Watching her grow up, I am often lost in the logical relationship between she and I—her in me and me in her. My concept of her and my relationship with her have become elongated, like an abstract memory. These are two threads, two paths of life, both in my memory and the girl’s.
Red wall, white shirt, red scarf and a blue-checkered skirt—such objects occasionally bring up a particular kind of memory and sentiment. For instance, a red wall might be big enough to bear a nation’s history, and small enough for one person’s sentiment. During different periods of my life, this image has held different meanings. Sometimes it stands strong and tall. Sometimes it is weak and fragile. For instance, The Gate of Tiananmen is merely an ancient building in our nation’s long history. Why can’t we just look at it like any other ancient building?
