CURATOR CRITIC
WAITING IS A POTENTIALITY:
THE EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS BY ZHIMIN
TEXY / ZHANG CHEN
Zhi Min tells a story about waiting, about an old monk who lives alone in the mountains and forests, waiting for his successor in solitude. He cannot leave the monastery for a step because he needs to wait for the next owner of the monastery he guards. What is this monk waiting for at the end of such a story? Or rather, what is waiting? Should waiting have its own binomial? In this regard, Zhi Min, as a sculptor, answers that the old monk in the story is waiting for a moment to come while the artist is waiting for a better self because the old monk can't leave without authorization and actively seeks the artist can only bury his head in his own world and work. In the same tension-filled internal system, passive waiting replaces active creation. A negative force reveals itself to be wise, surrounded by too many affirmations.
In this way, the waiting becomes an independent and self-contained act. All the significance of waiting lies in the waiting itself, and the subject of waiting is also its object simultaneously. Such waiting is passive but full of power. Thus, waiting has its own creativity, which gains more possibilities due to the absence of the framing of purposiveness. It is internalized into the process of art due to the continuous reflection of the subject. It is Zhi Min’s creation method, based on the idea that "waiting" is the most effective way to create. Waiting for Zhi Min shapes the unique rhythm of the artist's work in the form of potentiality.
We know that his personal sculpture creation has gone through several stages. We know that his personal sculpture creation has gone through several stages. Each phase does not follow the chronological progression but contains a rather long gap. From 2007 to 2011, Zhi Min said that what he did was wait. He decided to stop amid the rapid progress of his work. In the self-concerned hostage, he meditated on his thinking and passive behavior. On this basis, he has been able to start a solid creation from 2011 to the present, and the rich changes we see in Zhi Min's recent works stem from this, which makes it difficult for sculpture art to make such a breakthrough.
It can be said that the artist's waiting is related to time and space. The act of waiting is realized in concrete artwork, conveying the periodical relationship between the artwork and the artist. The waiting must go through a long time. It must also stand still, like the old monk in the story. The time and space towards which the act of waiting is directed simultaneously constitute the universe the artist faces. This is precisely the theme of his recent works: in the exhibition, the sculptures are transformed into the plane of the universe and colorful nature on the exhibition wall, but they do not attempt to reproduce the vastness of the universe; they are not a projection of nature or a mimicry of reality, but rather, the works and the nature are undergoing a change together, and the sculpture is changing along with its author. The sculpture and its author are in the middle of the universe, waiting for new possibilities to be generated. The artist behind the works, in front of the universe and nature in which he is located, makes a gesture of waiting. He reports calmness, sincerity, and reverence to the objects he observes in front of him. Instead of attempting to change nature with his creative actions, he waits for the realization of truth close to the truth and for the arrival of a better time and self. He faces the long-lasting tradition, the arrival of a better time and self, the "Trigrams of Luo and Yellow Rivers," and the "Oblique Universe.” The waiting of Zhi Min only pulls out a long shadow in "Sundial Silhouettes" when standing in front of the glorious heritage, when standing as a footnote to the torrent of the times, the genes belonging to the East tell the artist that the wiser course of action is to wait.
Such waiting has been fully discussed in the Italian philosopher Agamben, where waiting is close to a kind of ancient Chinese thought of inaction but also infused by Agamben with the contemporaneity of potentiality. There, potentiality means not to do. It is a vigilance against doing too much, sobriety maintained amid involution, and the act of potentiality is thus a passive synthesis, a passive creation, a gaze and stillness developed by Agamben from Deleuze or Hume. Such an act gives rise to a unique kind of self, which allows the individual to meet the world with instantaneous outbursts of artistic sensation rather than rational knowledge and allows the overlooking of the universe to be a natural outpouring rather than a technical sculpture. It allows the artist's work to manifest a stumbling tension rather than a blind impulse. It allows the creator to look back between the past and the future rather than obsessing over the illusion of seeking newness. Thus, Agamben's potentiality can be waiting, for the meaning of potentiality lies in its non-realization, just as waiting is the process of not needing some result. In other words, waiting as potentiality is precisely that which, because of its non-realization, because of its lack of initiative, returns its own diversity and unprecedented freedom, which is always accumulating possibilities, always ready to evoke the intensity of power in the upcoming future, and the act of waiting thus becomes an act of art, which, in the "moment of the most nurturing,” becomes the step of the artist.
On the one hand, the act of waiting is rooted in the limitations of the artist's body, consuming the life of everyone; the end of death is a constant reminder of the artist's infusion of life into his work; waiting is between finite life and infinite truth, forever tormenting everyone who looks forward to creation and harbors ideals--because of the urgency of time, because of the space, because of the intensity of space. Therefore, waiting becomes an act of art. Because of the urgency of time, the boundaries of space, the accelerationism from the outside, and the body’s inability from the inside, we must suspend and choose to wait calmly. On the other hand, our bodies are also the reality of nature and the universe. In the sculptural form of the Twenty-Four Solar Terms, we can see both the time and the space at the same time, we can see the change of the seasons and the nourishment of the things, and we can see the multiple bodies inside the work, we can see these bodies, and we can see that these bodies are the same as the bodies in the sculpture. At the same time, one can also see the multiple bodies within the work and see these bodies sprouting with nature in the repetition of yin and yang and the stretching of forms.
As a result, the waiting of Zhi Min writes a "Non-linear Narrative" in space and appears as a "Color of History" in time. Zhi Min's recent works remind people of the "cosmic” that transcends the individual and makes the medium of sculpture the medium of "cosmism.” His recent works are reminiscent of a transcendental "cosmic,” in which materials such as stone, clay, and porcelain, as sculptural mediums, are elevated to the moment of the cosmic explosion and the combustion theorem of thermodynamics while at the same time penetrating deeper into the inner stratum of the earth in the "Boundless Worlds,” and extending downward from the narrative of space to the "Depth of Time.” Or, in other words, to the real nature in the eyes of the Chinese. We can see that his works simultaneously express the modern vision of Op Art and the long tradition of Chinese history, just as "Trigrams of Luo and Yellow Rivers" connects the rivers of the earth and the Milky Way of the zenith at the same time, so the sculptural space and the temporal dimension of his personal art history are unfolding between each work.
This exhibition is Zhi Min’s first solo exhibition in the gallery. It is a testament to the artist’s active waiting, resulting from the back-and-forth and dialectic of active creation and passive behavior and the mutual waiting and simultaneous progress of Zhi Min's multiple creative threads. The sculptor and his works stayed in cosmic space, wandering amid the heavens, and have long been ready to land back in the world, entering the next stage of new waiting in coherent creation.
|
 |
