Sun Wenjia Solo Exhibition 'Where All Things Rest' Exhibition Preface
"The Whole cannot exist otherwise, because it is only potential and divided through activity... The universe is never given." - Deleuze, 'Bergsonism'
The contemporaneity of art always provokes people to reflect on all "givenness" in the world, whether it is natural or social, material or artistic, human or physical. Sun Wenjia's works are precisely concerned with how to break people's myth of this "givenness" and enable the audience to re-examine the conventional views in daily life. The works in All Things Find Their Home attempt to express the ambiguous boundaries between nature and civilization, living beings and inanimate objects, as well as their evolutionary relationships, through materials, artistic forms and the content they explore. The choice of lacquer as an artistic material is no accident for breaking the "givenness" in thinking. By using this material with East Asian cultural traditions in contemporary sculptures, the artist intends to arouse discussions on materiality in contemporary artistic concepts. It can be said that contemporary art continuously conducts in-depth research on the relationship between materials and the concepts that artworks aim to express. As a material, lacquer undoubtedly hits the core of the concept of contemporaneity, which aims to subvert all cliché views. While many artists are searching for and experimenting with various ready-made objects in post-industrial society (to break the shackles of traditional materials), Sun Wenjia uses lacquer to create a subversion similar to the "spirit is a bone" theory proposed by philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Simply put, since Duchamp's Fountain, contemporaneity has been committed to demonstrating the paradoxical logic of "spirit = bone", "non-art = art", "black = white" and "tradition = innovation". Therefore, it must subvert all common sense while constantly using things we are familiar with to achieve this subversion. Sun Wenjia frees lacquer from the confinement of being a "craft material" and awakens the various memories hidden in its history, thus evoking people's memories and imaginations about the relationships between East Asian materials and their regional, cultural and ideological contexts. In other words, lacquer is like Marcel Proust's "madeleine cake", allowing us to return to some forgotten fragments. Therefore, the works not only subvert the "givenness" of the material itself, but also even the concept of time in our common sense. Just as artist Edmund de Waal regards porcelain as a puzzle about time (the West took nearly 500 years to understand porcelain), Sun Wenjia also puts forward a puzzle about materiality—what is the relationship between this material we are accustomed to ignoring and the passage of time, and even the changes of nature? Once this puzzle is raised through lacquer, the mysteries wrapped in lacquer emerge, and these mysteries are all reflected in the shape and artistic form of the works. If we think that the fossils sealed in lacquer reveal cosmic activities prior to human civilization, it is better to say that fossils represent the evolution of life including human consciousness. As Henri Bergson understood, "matter is described as an obstacle that the élan vital must overcome, and materiality is described as the inversion of the movement of life". Both fossils, as products of nature, and lacquer, as a product of civilization, are merely barriers that life needs to pass through. Therefore, the movement of life must demonstrate its power by inverting all materiality. Today, we too easily draw a line between humans (civilization) and non-humans (nature), and even arrogantly regard human civilization as the center of everything. In response to this, Sun Wenjia's works truly subvert this rigid concept through the combination of fossils and lacquer. It can be said that many of the obstacles that life needs to break through are nothing but the rigid thinking of human beings. In this sense, the artist's works seem to echo the understanding of "archifossile" by Quentin Meillassoux, a philosopher of speculative realism, which is an opportunity to understand the world without being guided by the relationship between humans and the world. If Žižek believes that "spirit is a bone" is the manifestation of infinite life, Sun Wenjia's works remove the intermediate term of (Hegelian) spirit and directly express "life is a bone" through artistic forms. Although the driving force of life is not centered on human spirit, the former evolves on its own while allowing human consciousness to participate in it. No wonder the artist's large-scale sculptures imitate the joints of the spine while distorting the shape of the bones. Their significance lies in expressing the cosmic life force—changing the fixed organic structure and function. Just as Gilles Deleuze believed that Francis Bacon's paintings achieved the painting of "force" by depicting muscles broken by bones, Sun Wenjia attempts to achieve the effect of sculpting "force" through the deformed shape of bones. Here, lacquer, fossils, bones and the artist all seem to become fragments of life expressing itself. Yet, in this moment of fragmentation, they reflect the power of the entire universe, reaching a life realm where one can see the whole through its parts and making us realize that any "givenness" is nothing but an illusion. The profound meaning of the works is just like Meillassoux's discussion on fossils: "The ancient fossil demands that we trace thought, inviting us to discover the 'hidden path' it has taken, so as to realize the impossibility that modern philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries: to step out of ourselves, grasp ourselves, and understand what we really are."
--Zhang Jiarong
15 February 2023
Zhang Jiarong, PhD in Philosophy from Tsinghua University, holds dual master's degrees from the Philosophy Department of Tsinghua University and the Philosophy Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, guest professor at the China Academy of Art, translator of Žižek's Violence, proofreader of Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus. His research areas include psychoanalysis, Lacan, Deleuze, and Marxism.