| Leafing through notes, the critical juncture for this project began to germinate in the summer of 2007. It was just when Shi Jin-Song had finished a three-person show at the Today Art Museum, Nine Trees, and he took me to Beijing’s eastern suburbs for a look at the place where his works are being manufactured. I walked through tree roots and tree branches big and small as I listened to him talking about his current project. He was experimenting with smoldering the entire trunk of an enormous tree, turning it inside and out into a charcoal log. He would then burn it again as a work of art during an exhibition. | 
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Original Text by Wu Hung
Translation by Lee Ambrozy
Shi Jin-Song, 2’56”, 2008. Four-stroke gasoline engine 1.6 liters, stainless steel tubes, and angled iron bars, 110 x 118 x 139 cm. Courtesy of Platform China.
Leafing through notes, the critical juncture for this project began to germinate in the summer of 2007. It was just when Shi Jin-Song had finished a three-person show at the Today Art Museum, Nine Trees, and he took me to Beijing’s eastern suburbs for a look at the place where his works are being manufactured. I walked through tree roots and tree branches big and small as I listened to him talking about his current project. He was experimenting with smoldering the entire trunk of an enormous tree, turning it inside and out into a charcoal log. He would then burn it again as a work of art during an exhibition. From his suddenly quickening speech and the sparkle in his eyes, I could see the excitement that comes along with a technical challenge: even though few people venture to think, manufacturing charcoal is no easy task. Without mastery of the duration and of heat during the smoldering process, even a branch with the thickness of a finger will be destroyed, turned black on the outside but white on the inside. I learned this bit of knowledge as a child eating hot pot. At that time there were no such conveniences as natural gas or electric stoves. If you wanted to eat hot pot at home, you had to buy charcoal first. I remember that we often went to a charcoal chop near Houmenqiao. Mrs. Li, who took me, was an old Beijing Manchurian, and it was said that her father was a guard for Empress Dowager Cixi’s state treasury, but by the time of her generation the family was already in a complete state of decline. She had to spend at least half an hour picking through the charcoals, asking questions like what kind of wood was a type of charcoal made of, what color of smoke it gave off, and what kind of smell it was, while snapping a piece of charcoal now and then to see if the pitch black color was distributed throughout.
It was also in the summer of 2007—a time when I was anxious to settle a plan for Shi Jin-Song’s work in my exhibition Net—that I received a succinct e-mail he sent on August 8. He apologized for a late response, casually excusing this by stating he had “recently been to a jade mine, in preparation for a jade work.” My heart raced: I was curious about what attracted him to charcoal and jade at the same time. I knew from my study of art history that this kind of simultaneity is never fortuitous, even if even the artist himself isn’t conscious of the relationship between the two.
Looking back, I can generalize my planning for this exhibition as continuous reflections on this simultaneous occurrence. After the Platform directors Natalie Sun and Chen Hai-Tao invited me to act as curator for Shi Jin-Song’s exhibition, I began to formally engage him on the contents of this show. A few early proposals were negated through discussions and e-mail exchanges, while some obscure links became more distinct and more appealing. Finally, the exhibition concept was prescribed as the potentiality of fire and jade as art mediums, as well as the relationship between these two seemingly different natural materials or phenomena within the artistic imagination. The title of the exhibition—the Chinese character “yan”—comprised of the radical for “jade” with two components for “fire” beside it––provides a compendious description for the interrelationship of these two concepts. Here I must explain a little about using Chinese characters to summarize artistic ideas, a practice which reminds me of the theory of the late American art historian, George Rowley. Rowley proposed that an important characteristic of traditional Chinese art is its “ideational” representation, meaning that the artist is not principally trying to capture the external appearance of the observed world. Rather, his images result from subjective thoughts on the essence of and the conceptualization of objective reality. I agree with him, and would propose that the most concentrated proof in the infallibility of this thesis lies in the Chinese written characters, whose formation often simultaneously combine pictographic and ideographic elements. Regarding the character “yan,” Han dynasty philologist Xu Shen already stated in his Shuowen Jiezi that the character’s structure integrates “the graphs of jade and fire, which provide the character’s significance and pronunciation.” Therefore, this character can mean either fine, multicolored jade (as defined in “guangyun”) or “blazing radiance” (as described in “yunhui”). The composite of these two meanings leads to another significance concerning the relationship between jade and fire. Here we return once again to Shi Jin-Song’s exhibition.
Based on the present plan, this exhibition will include three works. Two are related to fire, and one uses the material of jade. Thus together they form the Chinese character for “yan.” The two fire-related works are titled 1500 °C and 2 min 56 sec. The former is the implementation of the charcoal project mentioned earlier, the latter consists of two exposed automobile engines that have been precisely calculated, transformed and reassembled, accompanied by two meticulously forged exhaust systems made of stainless steel. Owing to art history’s impoverished lexicon, we will temporarily call them “installations.” However, neither work employ “ready-made” materials in a conventional sense. Instead, their materials have resulted from transformations painstakingly designed by the artist—an entire tree trunk has been treated to create the first work; the second work has been meticulously forged from mirrored stainless steel. The extremely high level of technology employed in the manufacture of these two works—evident in a glance at their precise design blueprints—completely rejects the original significance of installation art. Yet their state of motion as shown in the exhibition, and their rejection of a pure visual signification make us unable to classify them as other established art forms.Both works imply force and danger, but force and danger of different sorts and divergent cultural connotations. Perhaps at first glance 1500 °C does not appear very visually striking, but just like lava that has suddenly come into contact with cold air, a discombobulated dark red inside this black carcass radiates an enormous quantity of heat, daunting and far surpassing the bright flames of firewood and even of coal. In contrast to this implicitly violent form is the dramatic nature and explosive force of 2 min 56 sec. The title of this work suggests the ignition intervals of the engine: accompanied by deafening sounds, the tangled mess of stainless steel exhaust pipes are turned red in a quick moment, a burst of heat on one’s face and a radiant pierce of light amidst the surrounding darkness. There is a possibility that these two works will be impossible to display because of their excessive danger, or special protective measures need to be adopted for the exhibition period. Currently, what attracts me is the combination of an extreme artistic vision and the use of precise techniques—characteristics of Shi Jin-Song’s work, which are given purified and elevated forms here. If a Western art museum were to exhibit them, the fire would necessarily be “extinguished” to make the two works silent and safe objects for appreciation. Displayed in Platform China in Beijing, however, these two works would embody intense social psychology. Their overbearing high temperature and sober technical process together reflect the present “China conditions:” the scorching-hot blasting method brings viewers into a modern state of anxiety, a pioneering, pulse-quickening critical landscape that causes cautious onlookers to hesitate a step before advancing.
These two works will respectively occupy the two symmetric ground floor halls of Platform China. The stairway between the two rooms will lead the audience to the main hall upstairs. Before entering the second-floor gallery, repetitive striking sounds will be audible, as if there is someone unconsciously and exhaustedly thumping on something. One’s first impression of this hall is a deserted and cheerless space, which forms a sharp contrast with the obliged boiling temperature downstairs. Searching for the source of the striking sounds, visitors discover that the sounds are coming from a small jade sculpture of a human head that is installed on a motorized stainless steel base. Powered by the base’s mechanism, it endlessly strikes the wall in front of it at the frequency of every 16 seconds (the title of this work is 144.58N.m, meaning the torque force of the jade head as it strikes the wall). Following its movement, a sunken dent will gradually appear on the wall; a hole will expand and scatter red brick dust over the course of time. However, the jade head and its crude outer appearance will bear not the least sign of damage, and will indifferently continue to attack and destroy that seemingly much more substantial wall.
Editorial note: This is an excerpt from the original article.
