In the midst of chaos, the birth of something new can take many forms. One of these is carving, where unwanted elements are chiseled away, gradually getting closer to and revealing the desired object, much like how the wind sculpts rocks or water carves valleys. Another method involves categorizing and summarizing seemingly unrelated fragments, then arranging and combining them according to specific rules, simplifying complexity, a process known as "reduction."
In Chai Mi's latest collage work, Wandering Traces, she explores and creates a rule that embodies a tension moving towards two extremes. One end, laid at the bottom, consists of concrete, realistic images such as landscape photographs taken by her during travels to various places, evoking imaginative locations ranging from rugged national parks and Chinatowns to weathered religious sites, mystical islands, underwater tombs, and even the subtle details of vacant tiles and pillars on streets. These diverse layers of human-made landscapes point to the past, history, and memory, reflecting changes in terrain and the accumulation of time. Her shooting angles often feature wide shots and overhead perspectives, not aiming to create grandeur but to accommodate a wealth of information. Post-production involves merging multiple perspectives, and the black-and-white processing gives it the appearance of a museum archive record. The other end, affixed to the surface, consists of abstract, geometric, and mirrored shapes. These geometric forms are mostly abstracted from images of spacecraft collected by the artist, with romantic names like Chang'e, Yutu, and Long March, pointing towards the future, immortality, and aspirations, reflecting human consciousness and desires. They may also include extracted patterns from scenes to fill in the vacancy or simply unrelated unknown entities, inviting imaginative interpretations. These latter elements point to the present, repetition, and the everyday.
As viewers gaze into the mirrored forms, the tension formed by the interplay of these two extremes accelerates and compresses the past, future, and present as a trinity. "The landscape looks back at the viewers with an empty, indifferent gaze in response to their stare, carrying on its face not only violence and destruction but, more importantly, the scars of brutal construction erupting on its surface." (W.J.T. Mitchell) As a result, the method of mirror collage resembles fashionable "tattoos," concealing the scars of human transformations on Earth, symbolizing desires, and celebrating the conquest of the universe. As technology evolves into a complex logic of events, a fashionable and romantic approach becomes more easily understood by the public, embodying a form of "reduction."
In Towards the Public, Boris Groys mentions the necessity of modernization to traverse the narrow passage from "past" to "future" through the "present." It involves "reducing everything that appears too heavy, too meaningful, imitative, or traditional according to the standards of the grand master." After departing from routine work, how to spend the present became a challenging question for the artist. By chance, Chai Mi mixed different types of black waterborne pigments and splattered them onto the paper, allowing the unpredictable and uncontrollable spread of black ink to mirror the arbitrary flow of time. To prevent indefinite extension, she began establishing rules, seeking a stable structure existing between square and circle. In a video composed of over 300 paintings, as the dates printed by a supermarket coder keep flashing, the ink seeps through the gaps of rules and patterns like a solar flare outlining, resembling a consuming black hole of energy. The repeated actions depict a struggle between the artist and the rules, a way for her to pass time, while the ink embodies uncertainty, difference, and new beginnings sought within the realm of the constant. This echoes Deleuze's notion of modern life: "Confronted with the most mechanical and stereotyped repetition within and around us, we extract minute differences, variations, and changes." After imposing a creative rule akin to a creator, she allows materials to collide and organically interact, akin to how plant roots intertwine underground yet sprouts emerge towards light.
The geometric rules represent Chai Mi's way of "reducing" the world, intensifying the observations, summaries, and self-created rules within the chaos, much like the weapons of aliens mentioned by Liu Cixin in The Three-Body Problem, dense enough to distort time and space, acting as a free-flying bullet. Clues to this can be seen in her earlier stop-motion animation work, I Play You Play We Play. The artist condenses the cycle of life and death in nature and the existence and annihilation of humanity into a pure game built with blocks. The blooming of flowers and the explosion of nuclear bombs bear a striking resemblance, as if this method could dissolve the bloodshed of death and the pain of war. However, I believe that the geometric language merely serves as the outer shell of the bullet. "The stars outshine the moon," as Chai Mi's daughter puts it, "because a star is greater than a satellite." This simple yet profound formula serves as the title of the exhibition, encapsulating a dense core, capable of piercing through all, containing within a childlike innocence.
Text by Gan Yingying
Chai Mi (b. 1985) graduated from the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University. In 2018, she was awarded the fellowship of Visual Arts by the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in New York. She currently works and lives in Beijing. Chai Mi's artistic practice revolves around individual identity, personal experiences, and nomadic thoughts, using various media to explore visible clues and hidden relationships in everyday life, revealing their ambiguity and fluidity. She pays attention to the struggles of individuals or groups across different time and space. Her artistic creation integrates various media such as moving images, photography, painting, installation, text, performance, and curation. Her work consistently reveals explorations into the ways objects, living organisms, and consciousness are related, as well as reflections on entrenched concepts and established rules...