Public release of information and ideas is becoming the mainstream trend in today's social media, and as such, the dominant ideology nowadays is in the leveraging of media tactfully to convey the social concepts to the general public. Among various ways to disseminate information, art has been a comprehensive means to deliver social concepts since ancient times. From Chinese literati painting to Japanese Yamato-e, from romanticism to Dadaism, different forms of art serve as the instrumentality to educate the public. However, the skin-deep interest in nothing more than the technical effect of an artistic work is often frowned at as being meaningless and superficial.
Though the function of art has been summarized as ‘being conducive to the enlightenment and to the ethics' in the very first chapter of Lidai Minghua Ji (The Record of the Famous Paintings of the Past Dynasties), the traditional concepts in art are rather difficult to be fully accepted by different social classes, due to the fact that the expression of art are often compromised in the cramming way of teaching, with very little regards to the right for comprehension from the audience and viewers. That is to say, when appreciating the painting of the Loft Scholars which embodies the spirit of mountains and rivers, all the viewers are supposed to ‘be so moved by the noble soul of the scholars that they even forget to eat'. Their feeling becomes certain presumed social subject in artistic deliberation and is often considered the standard for a good painting. And nobody cares about what the viewers really think.
This pattern of knowledge dissemination was described by Michel Foucault as the tyranny of knowledge power. Foucault believes that in a class society, power is in the hand of people who have knowledge. A society is gradually developed as knowledge is popularized and disseminated. Ordinary people however, according to Foucault, receive the knowledge in an entirely passive way. The traditional means of art exhibition planning well reflects this power/knowledge relationship, for the conventional way of arranging and displaying the exhibits (e.g. following the general history line or focusing on certain dynasties) runs an obvious risk of imposing the planner's ideas on the viewers. But does this cognitive process with subjective interference accord with the spirit of freedom and the principle of democracy that a museum education ought to have? First of all it is necessary for us to understand this basic point: in any exhibition planned by any organizer, it is only the exhibits that are the objective existences of time and space. All other elements are merely ingenious subjective instruments with which the planner explains a certain subject. Classification, development, significance, causality and even time, the planning of all these elements might be instructive, but the elements themselves are still not objective existences. Time, as a key concept in the study of history, is in fact subjective and illusory, as it is shown in Jin Jiangbo's production Timeline, which is displayed in this exhibition. The decay of an apple can be seen as a process, but time as a concept per se is abstract.
An artful planning can be regarded as a strategy of the planner, or as a persuasion, or even as a deceit. Based on this understanding, an objective and ever-lasting artistic work can be seen as a vehicle of any message in any context. Each exhibit embodies a specific meaning in its corresponding context and value system. You might say that all the intended meanings are the truth, yet you might also say none of them are.
It is the overbearing self-justification of the planners that deprives the cultural power of the artistic work and even that of the viewers. Every planner boasts of his planning ideas in the same way that Coca Cola and Pepsi compete with each other to promote their drinks in the marketplace. Each has its own unique selling points and you can hardly tell who is right and who is wrong. However, the general public are dazzled before a variety of idea-promoting tricks and they find themselves in an awkward situation: whoever they choose to believe, they will end up being indoctrinated.
In its long journey pursuing science and democracy, the world is crying for a brand-new medium for knowledge dissemination. Today, the spirit of democracy is filtering into people's minds. They came to realize that such a spirit should be maintained not only in political arena but also in public places where citizens of modern society can exercise their respective cultural power and at the same time, the principles of democracy are also fully respected.
The fact is that the public understanding of artistic beauty is far from being uncivilized, untasteful and irrelevant, as some patronizing cultural old guards would like to let us believe. On the contrary, the public has indeed a good grasp of beauty: maybe not so sophisticated, but pretty accurate. Thus the traditional art planning has finally taken on a modern approach: from ‘instructing' the public to appreciate the elements of beauty to ‘persuading'.
The New Media Art Exhibition of Qiu Zhijie and Jin Jiangbo is held against this academic paradigm shift with a new type of art planning to respect the cultural authority of the general public and to stimulate more interactions with the viewers,. We have carefully selected the masterpieces of some world-class installation artists for this exhibition. Though these works represent the best in today's installation art and artistic concept, they are at the same time interactive, explicit and amusing thanks to their own characteristics and to the positioning of this exhibition.
Public participation is the highlight of our exhibition planning. In the past, there were exhibitions that also invite public participation. For example, the ‘four treasures of the scholar's studio (writing brush, inkstick, paper and inkstone) were provided so that the visitors were free to paint as they pleased. It is an interesting idea to enable the visitor to wield his brush or to make pottery in public, and yet without the participation of the visitors, those exhibitions would still remain intact. The New Media Art Exhibition of Qiu Zhijie and Jin Jiangbo, however, is entirely different: the installation art works become inanimate objects without the participation and working of the viewers.
Participating in the art and becoming a part of an artistic work is indeed a very attractive theme. But installations art works in this exhibition are obviously different from those of the amusement park installations. Though all the public, old and young, are welcomed to participate, the artistic merit of each work as well as its philosophical connotation are unvarying. They represent the spirit of the artists, the style of their artistic schools, and even the very core of the creation of art.
The Archaeology of Memory is one of the late works that typifies the style of Qiu Zhijie, a world-renowned artist in conceptual images. Qiu Zhijie has noticed an interesting phenomenon that while the garbled characters displayed on the computer screen means nothing, each character itself looks familiar and ordinary even in such a topsy-turvy context. On the contrary, if a familiar and ordinary character is placed in a disconnected context, it will become odd and incogitable.
The Archaeology of Memory can be seen as a manifestation of the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida. From his point of view, the meaning of a word is subject to its own context. To free the word from its context is regarded as a countermovement of the process of the classic ‘construction', and he names it ‘deconstruction'. The ‘deconstruction' provides a broad yet inane space for the individual word to acquire its intended meaning. Just as Hegel said when the void of a word inclines to infinity, its intended meaning approaches nothingness.
When the intended meaning of a word approaches naught, its potential power of expression becomes indeed boundless. The rubbing of the garbled Chinese characters of The Archaeology of Memory sets a good example. Calligraphy rubbing, a characteristic representation of the history of Chinese classic literature, places this artistic work in an uncertain position in the history of culture. Judging from its form, the rubbing looks like the bamboo slip of Chin Dynasty, the stele of Han Dynasty, and even the stone inscription of Western Xia Dynasty. However, further identification of this rubbing seems impossible in the context since the there is no ‘event axis' to define its proper position in history. This means an uncertain position could cover full arrange of positions. History is not at all like a self-consistent account book. Trying to understand it in terms of causality is no more than an absurd wishful thinking. One would lose himself in the historical trend if he would trust too much on the superficial learning from his personal experience.
Timeline is an earlier work of Jin Jiangbo, a world-famous installation artist of new media. From an intuitional point of view, it seems as if the direction of this timeline can be controlled by the viewers just as history can be influenced by individual power. However, we should not neglect a detail that the images have been placed along the timeline in a disorderly and unsystematic way: from the Egyptian pyramid to the head of George Washington, various images of people and events of all ages are put together in pell-mell (at least seemingly so). Those viewers who are complacently obsessed with the direction of time have in fact been tricked by the artist: it is impposible to find the direction of time in such a disorder - moving forwards is the same as moving backwards.
From the standpoint of quantum physics, the chronological order is nonexistent. Time is a variable in nature and its elements are not the undifferentiated atoms with which one can construct buildings as Democritus or Plato imagined. An analogy may well elucidate this point. According to the traditional way of calculation, the origins of time are like grains of rice of identical volume. Assume that there is one grain in one unit of space and several in another unit - that's how people understand the concept of density. But in the real time calculated by quantum, even those grains are of different volume. As a result, even if there is only one grain in every unit of space, the time density would not be the same.
A grain, if too tiny, would be neglected in the measurement, because in the observation of the macrocosmic world, such as the study of the constellation evolution and the airflow circulation, the difference in a second can be neglected. Though this negligent attitude may not follow the spirit of science, such a trivial difference could be neglected as long as the scientists have done their best. However, no matter how imperceptible an interval is, there is a possibility of a sudden occurrence. In the microcosmic world, some surveying work may appear very awkward by adopting the conventional measuring principle. In most case, the observation period is even shorter than a second and an error of one second is simply unimaginable. It should be remembered that the macrocosm and the microcosm are no more than relative time-space concepts. As the book Parapsychology suggests, a second is 946,080,000 times the amount of a millimicrosecond. If the observation period is counted by millimicrosecond, a difference in a second would turn out to be a ridiculous joke. The time difference between a second and a millimicrosecond is equivalent to that between a second and thirty years. You can imagine it in this way: a slow journalist did not press the shutter release button quickly enough and happened to take a photo of Taliban killing a Korean hostage, but only God knows that the event he intended to shoot was taking place in 1977 when Gerald Ford had just stepped down from his presidency.
Just as the artistic work of Timeline suggests, the abruptness of juxtaposing the Chartist Movement and the Watergate Scandal may result from the negligence of a clumsy and incompetent journalist who pressed the shutter release button a few seconds late. In the everlasting memory of the universe, thousands of years can be seen as merely a fleeting instant. If a difference in a millimicrosecond could afford to be neglected, then ignoring a period of thousands of years should be no more than reasonable. Under such circumstances, the history of human civilization throughout ten thousand years is a confusing and plausible joke itself: the prophecy told by the ancient Shaman in his dreams was denounced for being fictitious, while Mendeleyev's dream of formulating the Periodic Table was acclaimed as an epic feat to change the history of science. The Pyramids, the Great Wall, the lost Atlantis in Atlantic Ocean, and this fantastic exhibition, each of these could be simply a bizarre dream in the eternal joke of time. All the presence will be no longer existent; and all the presence is nothing but a void.
