我正在看芝加哥超现实主义艺术家Gertrude Abercrombie于1941年创作的《Self-Portrait of My Sister》。画中的女人五官分明，脖子细长，她的目光投射在画框之外的未知地平线上。她那双明亮的蓝色眼睛与她的裙子、衣领和帽子的绿色和蓝色遥相呼应，帽子上装饰着深紫色的葡萄和一个开瓶器。她的嘴唇紧抿着，她的脸庞呈现出严厉、肃穆的表情，与她右手拥抱左手腕的俏皮姿态形成微妙的对比。有趣的是，画家是个独生女。她用了自画像创造另一个自我，究竟，这个想像中的妹妹是否比自己更聪明、更漂亮、更刻薄、更真实呢？在画家的记录中，她将这幅画称为「理想的艺术家肖像」，并指出：「我画的总是我自己，但实际上又不是，因为我看起来并不那么好，也不那么可爱。」这幅画让我想起了王伊芙苓韬程，以及王伊芙苓韬程所设想的所有其他可能的伊芙苓。

 
Central to Li’s work is his interest in the evolution of style and subjectivity as mediated by power dynamics across racial, sexual, class, and national boundaries. From the eighteenth century through the twentieth—while queer signs like the mannerisms of the by-then-obsolete European aristocracy were being adopted by cosmopolitan homosexuals in dis-identification with the increasingly dominant and normative social body of the bourgeoisie—growing exchange between East and West spawned fantasies permeated by fear of the foreign, resulting in Europe’s assimilation of other bodies, desires, and aesthetic traditions into its own canon.

 
〇． 海蛇（ 传说中的杀戮者）
据说， 多数海蛇都能通过皮肤呼吸。这些水生生物仍属脊椎动物，无腮。神奇的是，它们的皮肤能提供生存所需氧气的25%，再加上一个巨大的肺，让牠们浮到水面上换气的间隔时间可以长达几个小时。
传说中海蛇有剧毒，尽管如此，相比陆地蛇类而言，海蛇更不可能咬伤人类。即使偶尔出现这种情况，它们也常常忘记注射毒液。它们的身体有点像是被压扁过，像是鳗鱼，垂直扁平的尾巴起到桨的作用。蛇类学家相信，这是它们在陆生转投水生的过程中，产生的生存适应。
想象一下，如果水生海蛇遇到了它们的陆生姐妹，接下来会发生什么——
是拥抱、撕咬，还是逃之夭夭？

He tackles bitcoin mining and engineered nature in his ambitious installations

Nestled in the Shanghai suburb of Songjiang, Liu Chuang’s studio is piled to the rafters with neatly organized books. Maps of various scales hang on the wall. Among the many charts and diagrams stuck to the shelves, I also spot a periodic table of elements. This scholarly setting recalls the office of a historian or a geographer more than an artist’s studio – and yet, over the past few years, Liu’s work has impressed the Chinese art milieu with an ever more interdisciplinary speculative practice that spans video, sculpture, and installation. Employing an expansive web of references that continuously stretches the discursive framework of his own work, the artist has also challenged the limits of Chinese contemporary art as a whole.

One of the ways in which we assimilate the new is to insist that it is, in fact, old. Nothing comes from nothing, as the old saying goes. That certainly seems to be the case in Shanghai-based Liu Chuang’s three-channel videowork Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018). The work takes the form of found and filmed footage with a voiceover narrative that traces material and immaterial lines of power that have been deployed in China, over the past few thousand years, to conquer people and territories, and to generate material and immaterial profit. The narrative moves from economic inflation triggered in eastern China during the fifth century BCE, when King Jing of Zhou reduced the amount of copper in coins in order to fuel an obsession with creating enormous bronze chime bells, to nomadic bitcoin miners, operating outside any centralised banking system, herding their rigs across present-day China in harmony with the seasonal and regional variations in energy production.

 
说实话，我真的不知道关小是怎么做到的。研究她近几年创作中对于材料的选择，感觉像是在看电视节目《最强大脑》里的选手微观辨析一千条金鱼。当然这是一个不恰当的比喻，今天我们每人每天通过有形和无形的网络接收到的信息、感知到的现象远不可被量化甚至描述。在这个内爆的信息社会，置身于无所不在的信息流中，每个人都成了注意力不足过动症的易感体质。而关小的工作之所以突出，是因为她的工作直接取材于来自网络世界的万千意象，却能够在这一狩猎过程中始终保持着极高的专注力，忠于自己内在的世界观，在眼花缭乱的数据世界中找到事物的一种基本逻辑。

 
“我心里想要说的是形象如何变成新物体的事。”—— [古罗马] 奥维德，《变形记》 （《变形记》杨周翰译，人民文学出版社1984年5月第一页）

奥维德用这样一句意图明确的声明为《变形记》（著于公元八年）开篇。在其后的二百五十个神话故事中，这位古罗马诗人将变形主题按照时间顺序记述下来—有时以一种随意的方式，有时则是重述脍炙人口的希腊神话寓言，也有时会偏离到其他意想不到的方向上去。其中一则埋藏入了我们集体意识的故事，可以在罗马的博尔盖塞美术馆（Galleria Borghese）见到，意大利雕塑家吉安·洛伦佐·贝尔尼尼（Gian Lorenzo Bernini）的著名雕像描摹了处于半变形状态（mid-metamorphosis）中的仙女达芙妮（Daphne）的故事—她的四肢变成一棵桂树的盘枝，在她试图逃脱被爱冲昏头脑的阿波罗（Apollo）的时侯。同样，变形发生在我们的日常生活中；我们在电影中就体会过这些，因为电影配乐透过视觉图像使观众身临其境……

“ 有一片田野，它位于是非对错的界域之外。我在那里等你。”

——莫拉维·贾拉鲁丁·鲁米

2000年秋天，《新文学史》出版的期刊提出了一个疑问：是否存在身份“政治之后的生活”？马龙·罗斯对此提出：“哪种‘身份’？什么‘政治’？在何时何地的‘之后’？”他的观点是：在“身份政治”之前就已经有一种有关身份的政治了——而且“只要有身份的地方就会有权力斗争。” 而在同一期刊物中，埃里克·洛特将这种斗争定位于“参与性的差异政治”之内，在它的诞生之时，突发的社会运动发生碰撞、相互串联而形成一种不和谐的、群体之间磨合而成的社会结构。也正是在这一结构中，洛特定位了一种潜在的、反体制的政治，在其中，没有哪个人能被一场运动代表，也没有人认为哪场运动足以被赋予这种期待。

尉洪磊的“肥鼠”仿佛被太空时代美学感染的原始土地。三个在三脚架上的球体，每个直径1.5米（《泥球 – 1》《泥球 – 2》《泥球 – 3》，2014）让人想起艾洛·阿尼奥（Eero Aarnio）著名的“球椅”（Ball Chair），却拥有陶器天然粗糙的质感。还有一排由明亮的绿色假发制成的图腾柱（《她的一周》，2014），在形式上暗喻了康斯坦丁·布朗库西（Constantin Brâncuși）的“无限柱”（Endless Column）。受沃尔夫冈·莱布（Wolfgang Laib）同名作品启发的创作（《米房》，2014）中，三个金属物体（一个长房子、一个八号台球以及一个由球体、立方体、金字塔和圆盘组成的建筑结构）端坐在一个浅橄榄黄的块状物上。与《米房》一样，《威尼斯女人》和《油椅》采用了相同的非线性逻辑和方法论；它们从复刻阿尔贝托·贾科梅蒂（Alberto Giacometti）和约瑟夫·博伊斯（Joseph Beuys）的同名作品开始。

尉洪磊即便在其群体中也是独特的一员。他对于艺术意象的解译、转换和循环的观察极其敏锐。正如他的展览所体现的那样，他借鉴布朗库西与引用《闪灵》同样自如——两种指涉都在他的影像作品所构建的数字空间中找到了自己的位置。那些来自艺术史一些特定时间的形式——及诸多其他形式，再次出现在他的雕塑创作中。他驾轻就熟地使用材料，塑造出有些别扭的形状，承载特定文化的记忆和印象——好像本来就 是这样，本来就应该如此。

Liu Chuang’s latest work, Segmented Landscape (2014), consists of six metal window grilles, each bearing a distinct geometric pattern. Installed above visitors’ heads in the main hall of the Power Station of Art, the venue for the 10th Shanghai Biennale, it is lit by spotlights while an artiȷcial breeze causes pieces of white gauze, hanging like curtains behind each grille, to shift gently. The shadows cast by the grilles appear as patterns transposed onto the fabric. The overall eȴect is of a series of photograms, which seems ȷtting since the work is, to some extent, a snapshot of China in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when such window guards suddenly began appearing on houses and apartments across the country. At that time, they could be seen as a visual reminder of China’s burgeoning prosperity; here, they seem a quiet lament to the individualization that has been a by-product of economic growth.

No stranger to the American art scene, Liu Chuang’s conceptual art has been featured in several outstanding group shows in the United States, including “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” (2009) at New York’s New Museum, “28 Chinese” (2013) at Miami’s Rubell Family Collection, and “My Generation: Young Chinese Artists,” which recently debuted at the Tampa Museum of Art as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.