YeZhang
For Martin Heidegger, perhaps the best known philosopher to have tacked the thing(Ding), it differs from the object in that it is autonomous, self-supporting. (p16 the object)
This series of works is a combination of things and modern spaces, choosing objects or people that represent my memories, and experiences and placing them in a space that represents modernity. This work is set against the backdrop of an event that I remember, having experienced some of the unease, the tension that comes from gazing, and touching, at the pool. When entering a similar space again, this feeling reappears, in psychological terms, as a reenactment (the process of re-experiencing an emotion that has already been experienced) but it is only a feeling, and I continue to look at it with a cold attitude.
In Freud's book on recollections of childhood it says“If we try to recollect what happened to us in the earliest years of childhood, we often find that we confuse what we have heard from others with what is really a possession of our own derived from what we ourselves have witnessed. ”（p182）
'A big swimming pool', oil on canvas, 127*93cm
Paradoxically, even though my work looks cold, silent and absurd, I always associate it with my memories and emotions. I try to use painting as a means of demonstrating that experiences in childhood have an indelible influence on present mental behavioural habits, perhaps having long forgotten these childhood memories (bad memories of experiences at the pool). The strange phenomena that appear in the pictures (including the gentle surface of the water, the wearing of a life preserver that could not possibly be in the pool, the panicked look, and the deep bottomless pool of water) can also be interpreted as a response to bad childhood memories. It seems to be starting to reconsider whether there is a metaphor for THINGS in my work, but the contradictions are what drives me to create.
The still surface of the water, the restless figures and the bottomless pool of water in 'A big swimming pool' create a deceptive and dramatic space, with no piles of paint in the picture and a flat image to support the content behind. I put my self-portrait in the work and have the feeling of standing in a third perspective to see it. The proportions of the image are completely out of proportion to the reality of the space, with the nervousness of the figures contrasting with the calmness of the water.
Swimming Pool, 2008
Installation at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City
mixed media
dimensions variabl
Leandro Erlich's installation, The Pool, is a site-specific installation in which he appropriates a building that would appear in people's everyday lives, making it both familiar and unfamiliar to the viewer, who falls into Erlich's 'trap' as they enter the installation, turning from a spectator to a passive participant. It is uncanny how quickly the architectural spaces that Erlich constructs pass by. He uses scenes from his life as a stage, exploiting the audience's existing perceptions of them and subverting them.
In "a big swimming pool" I erased a lot of the perceptions of the pool, such as the clear water, the white or blue tiles, and the ladder... I erased these elements, but I also wanted it to be like a giant sink or whatever the viewer thought the space was, and I accepted all the imagery. I don't want it to be what I say it is, I feel excited when the viewer questions the work, like with 'Washing Machine' many people say it looks like a bin, 'Drawer' they think it looks like some bricks, I think things are things, the different understanding of the object comes from the perception of the subject.
The movie give a ritual pattern to the lives of many artists，and this introduces a kind of low-budget mysticism，Which keeps them in a perpetual trance.(peter Halley p14)
‘deep end’ This film, which I would describe as mysterious, has a depiction of a public bath that Experience the romance, the liveliness, and the angst, which is the ethos 'a big swimming pool' is trying to convey. I want to trap the viewer in an atmosphere of desire, frustration and brightness. I don't use dark, scary colours in my images, but rather bright colours. This seems to be the opposite of the message I want to convey.
“And their existence stems from what Kandinsky called “inner necessity”; yet they were fed through the tenor of our times, and followed Samuel Beckett’s conclusion that continuity is the only game left to play.”
No special materials are used in this work, a flat canvas with no heavy paint. It is when the viewer sees that the canvas is the canvas, without any obstruction, and removes the illusion of the image, that they can see the idea behind the canvas. This is exactly what I was thinking about, how I could get the viewer into the picture, deliberately creating a sense of detachment, denying the viewer access to the picture and discovering the powerful forces beyond the picture through gazing.
The 'categorical confusions’ engendered by mimetic representation did not wait for Marcel Duchamp's readymades to become apparent. The contest in antiquity between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, as reported by Pliny the Elder,2’ is exemplary in that Parrhasius won not for having painted the most convincing still life, but by painting a life-like curtain which Zeuxis thought could be pulled away to reveal another still life. For Lacan, Parrhasius’theatrical device proved not a mastery of technical means (a trap for the gaze） but rather a successful trompe-l’oeil, an eye-trick, which brought the subject’s unconscious gaze to light.（p17 the object）
Back of Snowman2003
Smithson explains that Donald Judd “might take a math equation and, by sight, translate it into a metal progression of structured intervals,”This was a means of escaping the out moded convention of “relational” compositional.（p16 Peter Halley）
Halley Using his unique language (geometry, fluorescent colours) he calls this fluorescent material "low-cost confrontation", using two and three dimensions to find a connection with the architecture, painting with precision and order, allowing the viewer to find the precise message he wants to convey in the image. His work is critical, a critique of geometric structures, trying to achieve a 'normalised' minimalism.
This theory leads me to the work of Gary Hume and Peter Halley.
Gary, whose work has a simple, elegant beauty, hume offers the viewer an abstraction of selective reality, where mundane objects are better presented through the means of painting, and he releases them again by destroying them, by destroying the work, the surface of which is a glossy paint that seems to present a sense of refusal to enter the picture, but by gazing at the work the viewer is brought back into the space that Hume has created. A space. The paint is poured directly onto the aluminium to create a smooth surface, a technique that reminds me of the texture of glass or a mirror, a surface that reflects the space of reality, a confrontation that forces one to look at what hume is telling and the meaning the work carries.
MAY 2022
Galaxia II
Avant Arte
Print Edition
When I look at this work, I feel that there is no quality to it, so much so that my mind goes blank. By using this three-dimensional work to confirm some uncanny feelings, he uses a seemingly ordinary, universal object to demonstrate that a seemingly ordinary things can be more uncanny, and closer to reality, than a deliberately horrific scene.
This can be linked to the term uncanny, which has been mentioned in previous studies.
Gary Hume
Dolphin Painting No.4, 1991
Gloss paint on MDF board
222 x 643 cm  87½ x 253''
His work of the door is reminiscent of Margaret's Betrayal of Images, is this a real door? Or does it have any intrinsic meaning that denies the premise that it is a door to be viewed. He does not use any text, image or colour to explain the work, it is a real size door that is placed in the pavilion and one contemplates the real meaning of the door.
To give the work its shape, and to form particular symbols, I began to forget about functions such as a door, a snowman, a bird, and I restrained myself from thinking about what they do. Once I started to think about the function, the role of the image, the shape disappeared and the metaphor behind it ceased to exist.
what lends the figure its strangeness is not the“contradiction” between the image and the text. For a good reason: Contradiction could exist only be- tween two statements, or within one and the same statement.（p19）
A pipe is a pipe, and when this image appears to the viewer, the shape and function of the pipe will immediately appear, but Marguerite's use of text makes the direct connection between image and text misleading, while blurring the meaning of the image and text and removing the connection between them.
“Kantian myth” that the art object is s a "thing in itself. "Instead he urged an understanding that the w work of artists is dialectical: Things are not things in themselves. They are related to other things." （p21 Peter Halley）
In this work, I have continued the materials used in Washing Machine, a reference to Peter Halley's use of hard materials to give the image a confrontational, escapist atmosphere. But I am also fighting against the 'meaninglessness' of this work.
In Freud's book, the symbol of man can be a pistol, an umbrella, or a hammer... Seeing this, I thought that the hammer was flesh, so I used the image of the hammer. The hammers are floating on water and floating in the air, appearing in a strange atmosphere. The recurring hammer, placed in a strange space, I worked to eliminate, to blur the form of the object with the viewer's objective impression of the hammer, to transform the object into a symbol, to become the maker of a completely new object. The birth of a completely new symbol exists in a certain space, ordered and complete. Just like Andy Warhol, whose works are subject to blurred or incomplete parts, he uses a repetition to re-establish an ordered form that is regular and at the same time unattainable by a single image.
Thus today as never before, the object is universalized: all over the world men come in contact with objects analogous except for small national differences which are always diminishing and are limited to minimal particulars.（p72 the object）
Today, some of the industrial products of everyday life are a total memory of the era. Like electronics, public transport, and commodities, I think that the architecture of an era is more representative of the traces of that era than the buildings of that era.
Andy Warhol who take the premises of Ortegan modernism to their furthest limit. Warhol applies the "inversion" of modernist dehumanization not only to his art but to his life. With the help of electronic recording devices, Warhol abandoned "lived realities" to concentrate on the pane of glass”(PETER HALLEY)
Just as Warhol's work always features consumer goods, film stars, and celebrities, he interestingly expresses modernism，as meaningless or as the artist does not give meaning to the work, freeing it from its constraints and making it more relaxed and lighter.
Craig-Martin’s early work tested the boundaries between functional and functionless forms... His acute observation of ordinary objects has created an era-defining lexicon of consumer products.（p7Craig-Martin）
There is a whole new way of looking at the world, if we look at the world, the subject and the object are completely different, and seeing the world as an object and a subject are completely different. But the way I see it now is that an object is an object as the subject sees it, so there is a philosophical way of looking at the world, at everyday life, and nature. As a human being, I began to question our particularity, the fact that objects have no senses. There are two kinds of objects in the world, objects without sensation and objects with sensation, which are part of the world. As such, these objects bear witness to our experience or their experience or experience and time.
I choose the hammer with its present qualities as the object that represents my memory, creating absurd, strange sensations. When I place the object that represents the present in a space that represents the present, I impose my memories, and my feelings on the object and the meaning of the object itself is removed from me.
In Pop Art, the artists represented in their way objects from everyday life, such as food, electronics or objects that can be found everywhere, whose meaning is not superficial but is found in a philosophical sense. For example, the telephone, the camera, the mobile phone... It is the information, the countless papers, the storage space, the memories that are stored through a small object... And the objects of everyday life always appear in my work too, I give the object feelings through my memories, experiences, and emotions, eliminating its meaning as the object itself.
Although only a small amount of 3D material appears in my UNIT3 work, I am very interested in the connection between 2d and 3d, and simplifying images into almost geometric images is part of my approach. I find a lot of geometric structures in everyday life, for example in schools, transport, and architecture, people are guided by this geometry, minimalism analyses how modern people are obsessed with geometry, open the door and look at modern architecture and it is only natural that geometric images are everywhere. Ideologically geometry is always associated with industrial materials, the use of special material surfaces, the abandonment of perspective relationships and the reorganisation according to specificity and continuity.