Womanifesto Guangzhou exhibition description by Jasphy Zheng

Biljana Ciric, the curator of the exhibition invited individuals who visited the exhibition in Guangzhou to write and a share a description:

Project #1: Repetition as a gesture towards deep listening

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 separation. Here we allow radical and intimate expansion of description of encounter we experience physically and finding ways to allow other 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.  Biljana Ciric

Jasphy Zheng

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).

 

的展览描述

如果我要“克服我们的孤立和静止”并且“转移观看展览的身体体验”,确切地说,是转移我对几个月前在某一日观看展览经历的记忆,我无法信任言语。

为了回溯我的记忆,我完全放弃了文字,转向其它更为真实可靠的媒介,即使它们也可能会更加抽象和矛盾。

要翻译转瞬即逝的记忆,这种尝试让我想起了我当年作为一名艺术学生曾经做过的一次颜色作业,要求我们创建一个调色板来传达一种感觉、一个想法或一个场景。我最成功的实验是用四种颜色重现“奶奶的客厅”。我认为这个练习将是目前我所面临情况的完美解决方案,所以我就按这种方式进行描述。

这一次,我制作了三个调色板来翻译我三月底参观广州展览那一天的记忆。除了我在展览空间所看到的,我还试图在我的日记中加入一些额外的信息,比如炎热的天气、我携带的饮料、博物馆的环境以及和我同行观展的人,作为记忆的补充。