On Square

-So you are still hating the squares.

-If I have to say, it's not as annoying as it was. I am a person whose dislikes and likes come and go quickly and naturally. But I've declared that I hate squares, so I will keep playing the role of having a square allergy. I have to admit that sometimes I have been attracted by the charm of the square. Taking measurements, polishing edges, maintaining corners: from this perfect cut of the latitudes and longitudes for all human activity, we weave cloth and history, build houses and cities. The fundamentalism of the square is not only utilitarian but also aesthetic. No organ of the human body is strictly quadrate, but we have always unconsciously adapted to the square aesthetic. We smooth the mud walls, clean the dwelling, throw out every unpleasant thing, and then shut the door to ease in this enclosed rigid environment, like in the studio. So I'm still hating the square. Cleanliness and safety are always good, but being locked up in a studio feels like being in prison.

-You sound like the kind of person who calls her ex ugly and sounds not caring but will secretly look at her ex’s photos. What causes the changing of your attitude against squares?

-First of all, I have to defend that I am not the type of person who secretly looks at my ex’s photos and wipes tears, do not slander me. I’m not sure when I became more tender toward squares, maybe people really generate extra emotions toward things they scold. 

Last year I drew a series of horses, using my fingertips to find imagery of horses buried under charcoal on each piece of paper. I made a plaster frame for the series so the horses I drew could be trapped in a rhetorical square barn. I accidentally broke this frame a month ago, so now you are seeing the photo of it after the scatters were glued back together. I have always been cruel toward my works because I believe that damage and decay are part of the narrative of material; in fifty years we shall all die. But I was sad when I saw the frame was broken, while the charcoal imagery remained inside the frame was well protected. The horses were finally free and had escaped the siege, but where had they gone? Outside the siege is still the siege, and wherever they flee, the siege follows them, because we are the ones who built the wall, and we are the wall itself.

There is also such a town surrounded by high walls in the movie Spring in a Small Town. The heroine is just like any other small-town housewife, stuck in her household, stuck in the town. Every morning after groceries, she climbs up the high wall for a walk, looking at the scenery out of the town, and dreaming of possible freedom outside. Some people eventually left the town, and those who left would never come back.

One day I took a walk around the hallway of the studio, round and round just like her. Coincidentally, the studio corridor is also nearly a square, and every time I return to the door of my studio I know that I have come full circle, like how Sisyphus has rolled the stone up the hill again. Why is he rolling the stone? No matter how high he climbs, he can't fly out of that mountain. Will there be a time when he finally doesn't have to roll the stone up the mountain again? Walking a few more rounds I began laughing at myself, pretending having a deep thinking walk won't tell you anything but losing weight.

-Yes, you do it all the time. You need to find a narrative around what you're doing to make the thing logical to bluff. So, did you lose any weight?

-No, I had an extra cola. But before I got discouraged, I found an earplug on my path. It was actually quite obvious, fluorescent green, and it was lying right in the middle of the corridor, but I never noticed it. I picked it up, thinking about Sisyphus. Seasons rotate, picking up, putting down, remembering, forgetting, this is the fun of rolling the stone every day. Maybe pushing the stone was never the goal, but his goal was to see the mountain, where his labor took place and became the agency imagery of the toil. The mountain exists from the beginning, but we are in the mountain, so we cannot bird-view the whole picture of it. Thus, we need to measure and feel the mountain step by step and day by day with our feet, just like how we want to see clear the besieged fortress while being in it.

-Your words remind me of Bruce Nauman's performances around the perimeter of a square, walking the path of a square repeatedly for ten minutes.

-I feel like he's painting instead of performing. If you imagine the floor as the wall, the square route as the frame, and his feet as the brush, he is the kind of painter who is extremely neurotic on the edges of paintings, which was the opposite of my case. When drawing those horses, I was not aware of the frame, only taking it as a prop. It was after the installation that I realized the frame was more meaningful than the imagery. It is a horse pen, a home, and a wrapped narrative. The way to inadvertently break through the siege is not at the fingertips that created the imageries, but on the frame that held the imageries and took in every strike of the fingertip. With the creation of each new horse image, the frame was also stained by the charcoal a little bit more, forming itself a new object. In the alternation of imagery, the square’s edges also change constantly, like the quiet shudder of a horse's yoke before breaking.