| I like humoristic art, so I use this method to express my ideas. Sociology and urban anthropology are useful methods for observing humans in society. But when they try to explain the relation between human and society, logics of common language turn to become useless. This is the one of the main reasons I’ve chosen humor as an artistic language to express ideas. I know that art cannot solve social problems, but I just want to present the problems through art, and I believe this is the real role of art. Even though the power of art is expressed thorough the humor, sociology and urban anthropology cannot replace art and artistic language. | 
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Jin Shan
Jin Shan, I am 27 Years Old (We Win!), 2004. Book installation, 70 x 50 cm. Courtesy of Pékin Fine Arts.
I like humoristic art, so I use this method to express my ideas. Sociology and urban anthropology are useful methods for observing humans in society. But when they try to explain the relation between human and society, logics of common language turn to become useless. This is the one of the main reasons I’ve chosen humor as an artistic language to express ideas. I know that art cannot solve social problems, but I just want to present the problems through art, and I believe this is the real role of art. Even though the power of art is expressed thorough the humor, sociology and urban anthropology cannot replace art and artistic language. Each of them is irreplaceable and codependent.
I use the historical photographs scavenged from the Cheng Huang Temple book market to construct a scrapbook of childhood memories. Each page in the scrapbook portrays one year in China’s collective historical memory and the year of my life as well. The cumulative effect of so many photographs is alienating; the viewer longs for something personal, something he or she can relate to, something of my own memory and experience. As an artist, I insert myself into these public memories in different ways at times as a participant, at others as a wry observer. The scrapbook shows Chinese lives and how the public sphere dominates them.
