Rooftop Movies
Terracottatile, underglaze color, ironbracket, projection，2022-2025
Mud-brickhouses have been common in China for more than 1,000 years, and have only gradually disappeared in recent decades. Born in 1987, I lived in a mud-brick house for 18 years. In this work, I carved each scene of the movie storyboard on mud tiles and fired them in a kiln. Then, I used these tiles to build a roof. The scenes of all the tiles constitute a "storyboard" movie. The content of the movie is about a group of people wearing black protective clothing and gas masks, seemingly wandering aimlessly. They experienced some surreal scenes and spaces, encountered various absurd events, and finally disbanded and returned to their ordinary lives.
Theentire roof also forms a projection screen. From time to time, some characters appear on the roof with bright light. This concept comes from the image imagination brought to me by the bright light when lightning illuminates the roof before the rainstorm, and it also forms a "lightning version" of the movie. The content of these lightning images simulated by projection is related to the storyboards I drew on the tiles, but more fragmented. The flashing characters will wear black protective clothing and enter different virtual spaces, and have strange connections with the real scenes of the countryside, animals, robots, and space capsules.
12Mpa wind
Ceramicsculpture, surveillance video, variable dimensions，2024
In the traditional productionprocess of Jingdezhen, the glaze blower is a profession that is responsible for glazing the clay. Master Zhan has been engaged in this type of work for 26 years. He has a workshop of less than one cubic meter. Every day, many people send various clays to him for glazing of various colors. I used clay to replicate Master Zhan's head 1:1 and placed it on his workbench, facing him. "Master Zhan" made of clay bears all kinds of glaze powder splashed by Master Zhan every day when he works. The glaze powder gradually piles up thicker and thicker over time, and the face of the clay head becomes more and more blurred, bloated and deformed, until it can't bear it. At this time, I put the clay head into a 1380° kiln for firing. Under high temperature, the glaze powder on the clay head melts and flows, re-presenting a hard head outline and getting a different "skin". The video in the surveillance shows Master Zhan's daily work and the changes of the clay head over time.
The land History – I
Ceramic,300x400cm,16pieces，2024
This work is a portrait of mygrandmother, an 86-year-old woman. All the colors that make up the portrait come from the soil in her living radius, including the mud from the walls of the collapsed old house where she had lived for 70 years, the wood ash mud in the stove, and the mud from the hillsides, fish ponds, farmlands, vegetable fields, and ditches around her home. The soil played different roles in different historical times. As a material material in history, it will inevitably return to history after forming a new image.
My Ancestors
ceramics,old clothes, blue and white glaze, series,various sizes，Inprogress
"Burningclothes" is a ritual for worshipping ancestors in many places in China. My family also holds a "burning clothes" ceremony every year to worship ancestors. To this day, the ceremony does not really mean what it literally means - burning clothes. Some places use paper-cut clothes instead, and some places gradually simplify it to only place offerings such as food and wine. I stubbornly believe that the literal meaning of "burning clothes" must contain a certain mysterious channel - connecting with ancestors and obtaining certain unknown information. This mysterious channel for obtaining uncertain information is very similar to AI that obtains new images by feeding graphic information. Based on this, I tried to use the portraits of my existing direct relatives, combined with sporadic text descriptions in the family tree and my imagination, as "sacrifices" to "worship" AI to obtain the portraits of my ancestors. At the same time, I used old clothes covered with mud as the base, and fired the portraits of the "ancestors" I got from AI with blue and white glaze through silk screen. During the firing process, the clay retained the shape of the clothes, and the distortion and unevenness of the surface and the contraction of the mud made the portraits deformed and more blurred and difficult to distinguish. Perhaps, this is what I think of as “burning clothes,” a “new ritual” that attempts to connect with ancestors.
Mr. Zhan
Porcelain,trash glaze , series, various sizes，Inprogress
The land History – III
Ceramic,The dirt in the newly built village has been demolished，series,variable dimensions，Inprogress
