“Thinking and practicing how we could allow someone distant and not physically present to encounter exhibition, to feel it and sense it, I have invited few colleagues to provide exhibition descriptions. These descriptions go beyond the image based documentation of the exhibition or its review but try to explore what is there more for us and how we could talk, share these experiences in times of seperation.
Here we allow radical and intimate expansion of description of encounter we experience physically and finding ways to allow others distant bodies to explore relationship within the world beyond judgment. For this exercise I have invited artist Jasphy Zheng and curator Cai Qiaoling and I thank them for participation. ” by Biljana Ciric
Jasphy Zheng Description
If I were to “overcome our isolation and immobility” and to “transfer physical experience”of viewing an exhibition, to be exact, my memory of the experience of viewing an exhibition on a specific day few months ago, I can’t trust words.
In order to retrace my memory, I abandoned text entirely and turned to other mediums that are more authentic and reliable, even they can be more abstract and ambivalent as well.
This attempt of translating a fleeting memory reminds me of a color assignment I used to do as an art student in which we were asked to create a color palette to convey a feeling, a thought, or a scene. My most successful experiment was to recreate “grandma’s living room” with four colors. I think this exercise will be a perfect solution for this situation so that's exactly what I did.
In this case, I made three color palettes to translate the memory of that day when I visited the exhibition in Guangzhou at the end of March. Besides what I saw in the gallery space, I was also trying to include additional information such as the hot weather, the beverage I carried, surroundings of the museum and people I shared the day to supplement the memory as a segment in my diary.
Jasphy Zheng
Living between the US and China, Jasphy Zheng is an interdisciplinary artist whose art practice persistently explores topics including the inevitable failure of communication and the imagined collectiveness shared among individuals. With environmental installations, unannounced performance, ephemeral sculpture, and artist’s books, Zheng constructs situations as public interventions to raise our awareness of social and cultural environment in and out of the context of contemporary art. Zheng received a BFA with honors from Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions and artist projects was on view at Rockbund Art Museum (2020) and CCA Kitakyushu (2020).
