| Zhang Hui once acted the lead role in a movie called Soap Opera, by Wu Ershan. The plot revolved around a middle-aged man who was tortured by the racket of everyday life, constantly struggling in the intermediary space between normal and abnormal. The expression of the man’s face was always that of numbness, like a mask that covered his psychological weakness and spiritual emptiness. This role came naturally to Zhang Hui; for the same image is seen continuously throughout his sculptures, installations and paintings as well as his performances. In those visual scenes, bald-headed men wander about in fragmented and trivial everyday life; sometimes planting trees, other times admiring the landscape, always with their mouths chattering away as if pondering the quandaries of their existence. |  |
Returning Debt – Qiu Zhijie on time and bricks of Zhang Hui
Zhang Hui once acted the lead role in a movie called Soap Opera, by Wu Ershan. The plot revolved around a middle-aged man who was tortured by the racket of everyday life, constantly struggling in the intermediary space between normal and abnormal. The expression of the man’s face was always that of numbness, like a mask that covered his psychological weakness and spiritual emptiness. This role came naturally to Zhang Hui; for the same image is seen continuously throughout his sculptures, installations and paintings as well as his performances. In those visual scenes, bald-headed men wander about in fragmented and trivial everyday life; sometimes planting trees, other times admiring the landscape, always with their mouths chattering away as if pondering the quandaries of their existence. The surrounding violence and pageantry function merely as symbols. Meaning seems to infuse every event, yet it remains unclear, only adding to their quandary. Irresistible is this search for meaning, but the search only deepens the quandary as if growing out from the process of reading itself.
From start to finish, theatre is the center of Zhang Hui’s artistic practice. This theatre is constructed through the use of a hyper-realistic everyday life. Even banal events such as making soup and fixing food are contiguous with those living in dreams, just as the violence of the chef’s knives and the bricks are contiguous with the luscious melody of a female voice. The conflict between the ritual of the banal and that of the dream are the primary components of Zhang Hui’s dramas.
Zhang Hui creates the element of theatre primarily through addition: adding hyper-reality to experiences of everyday life or, if one prefers, adding realism to abnormal life—the two are intertwined and mutually define one another. This type of experience is heavily dependent upon grayish blue lighting, strange masks and other details to create a dream-like atmosphere. Using a method of addition in which 1 + 1 = 3, Zhang Hui constructs a direct method to resolve the problem by changing an element into something else (within certain boundaries), thus radiating the power of its internal hyper-reality. This transfer is primarily achieved through compulsion.
I once observed how Zhang Hui trains students to control their bodily experiences by placing ordinary bodily states under certain conditions until they have been compelled to sublimate into theatricality. He first has a pair of students face one another and speak casually. On one side, a person is talking while, on the other side, a person stacks bricks, building into a slowly rising column that starts to wobble. Zhang Hui has them continue to stack bricks until no more can be added to the top. To prevent the column from toppling, one person must continuously hold out his hand to support the column, all the while continuing with a “normal” dialogue. It is only after the performers’ bodies have grown accustomed does Zhang Hui have them perform without the bricks. It is at this moment that something remarkable starts to happen, the anxiety formed under extreme circumstances remains conditioned within the body, imbuing normal dialogue with a sense of ceremony. Even slight gestures instantly gain meaning, becoming a source of inspiration. For Zhang Hui the teacher, this is a form of training; for Zhang Hui the artist, this is an artistic method. The conditioned anxiety towards the toppling column of bricks becomes the equilibrium state of the body. Even after the bricks are removed, this state of compulsion remains. It is at this moment that the rationality of ordinary life begins to fissure. In his latest works, Zhang Hui opens up a new series of fissures in ordinary life. As the proverb says, “only when there are fissures can they be filled with sand.” Only, Zhang Hui does not intend to fill them with sand, but with something much larger: bricks.
Ordinary life is distilled through choice and re-construction. Zhang Hui, Wang Mao, Wang Renke and Wang Chen formed the Yixiangju Art Group to engage with this issue. By selecting different segments from their ordinary lives and cutting them into a documentary of a “particular person,” they form the basis for a whole series of multi-media works. Through this deconstruction of the reconstruction process, this “particular person” is no longer Zhang Hui or any others of the group, but “anybody”—even you or I. The abstract nature of this identity has made this “particular person” become a metaphor, with every movement pre-scripted into a model behavioral action, a diagram of movement for a course on behavioral studies.
These video materials are extended into photographs and sculptures. In the process of extending into these two mediums, they transmute and materialize everything in its original. These are the details of ordinary life, extending another step and calmly peeling off another layer of this humanist tradition. Within the photographs, these basic visual elements are placed within the stream of time; within the sculptures, these elements are defined within a particular space.
Within the photography works, the difference between one day and another is the actions of this “person,” which have been set out chronologically within the image frame. What was once sequential synchronic movement has become a period where both exist diachronically. Over one hundred people act out all the different actions of one person, only further emphasizing that this particular person can be any person, or is anyone. Let’s change perspectives and view from the eyes of the audience as they sweep over the long photographs traveling from one point to another, reading the hidden temporality of this image which is apparent within diachronic time—causing these images to possess a feeling of a long scroll of calligraphy. Just like calligraphy, this type of photography requires a systemic reading. Compared to ink painting, its superiority is that this systemic reading is not necessarily linear, even though it is able to reverse direction.
The power of linear arrangement of event has been given to the viewer, but the viewer continually misreads, even to the point of completely overlooking the element of time itself, interpreting this temporal image as an experience of a large scale celebration. This causes the photographs to have an ambiguity: originally encoded regulations have become broken by superficial readings. Events with origins and meanings have decayed into fragmented and meaningless postures. Through a very stringent arrangement of daily life, Zhang Hui exaggerates the irrationality of everyday life and its inherent mysteriousness.
Within the sculptures, which are based upon the development of movement of video works, Zhang Hui and the Yixiangju Art Group have pretended to take seriously the series of movements of ordinary life, while revealing discrepancies in their positions, all the while claiming to be on the same base but of a different column of bricks. In actuality, they are mounting a return to observe the original condition that seeks to materially describe the phenomenon of everyday life. But it is only symbol: the scale of distances is claimed to be of equal proportion, but the sculptures are not in proportion to the buildings and equipment which leads the human image one step closer towards symbolism. Not only is it their color, and the fact that it is the same faces for 100 people, rather, it is that they are floating outside of a falsely but rigidly defined proportional space. Like the photographs that seek to rigidly construct the relationship between movements and time, these sculptures trace out rigidly defined movements within the space. But the rigidity of this spatial relationship is still unable to become reality, a “representation,” but rather reveal an absurdity.
It seems I have not yet even begun to touch upon the most visible part of Zhang Hui’s work, the bricks. If one were looking for a materialist explanation, then the bricks are a substitute for everyday tools and implements, a book in one’s hand, a bucket of water and even the mobile phone that we hold close to our ears. The exchange does not require a reason, just as “anyone” can play this role—perhaps the books and mobile phones are nothing more than bricks wearing masks. The bricks entice readers’ extrapolations—Beijing construction sites, the fighting style of Tianjin residents, the posts on website blogs and also Yang Fudong-like intellectuals. However, I realize that the basic purpose of the bricks in Zhang Hui’s work is to have these explanations become meaningless. Perhaps the appearance of bricks (while indeed making it appear that these people in the images are fighting) is nothing more than appearance. But this is ultimately not the case either. Rather, the appearance of bricks sets a certain order to sway—since these implements of everyday life can be replaced by bricks, they can also be replaced by anything else. The crux is to make this transposition appear “legal.” If this transposition is “legal,” then the original order is not “an unalterable rationality.” This sets the original order to sway. The more the original spatial order is made to seem rigid and rational, the addition of bricks only makes it appear more absurd. It is because of this that the person that we imagine is both “somebody” as well as “nobody.” Bricks are “something,” at the same time, they are “nothing.” The appearance of bricks have placed a “void” within the order of reality.
Only now can we turn back and understand why it is so necessary to stringently construct the relationship between space and time. The real reason behind their construction is that they will be deconstructed and proven false.
