Harriet Min Zhang
哈利
1. Projects
Somewhere in the fog / 霧下症狀
Clean noise / 靜噪
Time moves with merciful slowness... / 慢鐘
Under the gavel / 一聲千兩
The enduring ephemeral / 慢漫
Echoes of Mt. Qomolangma / 珠穆朗瑪的迴響
I spoke to them
Parallel
Blue cables in Venetian watercourse / 他山之石，新代理人
People’s Park Plinth
2. Public programmes
3. Writings
4. Translations
5. studio@DING
6. About
7. Chronological archive
Exhibition text
Ruofan Chen’s solo exhibition, Time moves with merciful slowness, showed a selection of her latest paintings, sculptures and moving images. They were on view from 4 August to 16 September 2023 at Gallery Func in Shanghai which is now permanently closed.
The exhibition could be considered a constellation of portals that delivered audience to Chen’s differentiable manifolds represented by the trajectory of falling objects derived from her moving images, the viewports of digital construction of models and textures in her working files, the occurrences of motion blurs visualised through vector quantities such as wind and gravity, and the cache holding transcribed image data of various botanical specimens on canvas.
Botanical Bank: 54 Objects Transplanted (ii). 2023. Video with sound. 46 min 1 sec.
Most of Ruofan Chen’s new works then were based on one of her moving images, Botanical Bank: 54 Objects Transplanted. She continued in this exhibition the act of transplanting in an attempt to rehearse her version of time unaffected by gravity. It was an inquiry into the differentiability of meanings by her reimagining both dynamic and static incarnations of transplanted objects. As told by Chen, these plants were taken from Jinshanling and she often compared collecting plants from the nature to borrowing books from a library; there was not enough time to wander and she could only take a few. In Chen's moving image installation, the field forces - particularly, gravity and wind - in the virtual world were set up differently. She has also planted hair on some objects, inviting the audience to embrace the softness.
Pre-germination (Ziziphus Jujuba). 2023. Installation (LCD screens, 3D print, jujube tree trunk).
80 x 180 x 30 cm.
Here are some keywords: wind paths, falling/landing, emitter, grid, frame of reference, specimen, motion blur, cache. How selfish am I to interpret Chen’s images in terms of calculus or geometry due to my personal interest but I do think they have constituted a fascinating mathematical atlas! Chen's works appear to geometrise the mobility of materials. In her fiction, the axiomatic system of the real world is no longer a universal truth. Objects are allowed to edit themselves to some extent, for example, breaking free from the enforced falling condition and leaving traces of motion lags. As for us spectators, we seem incapable of following the objects and may rationalise our failure to recognise the objects’ autonomy. Thus can Chen’s images be read as fragmented memory cache of the objects when they develop changes like motion blurs? Nevertheless, Chen is demonstrating an act of exchange between the static grid or reference frame and the active projectiles.
We have nihilism on one hand and the rise of OOO on the other. Yet Chen’s creations are not burdened with pressure of clumsy meaning-making. She is encouraging us to remove the command-focused modal verbs when we attempt to understand nature; for example, instead of asking how we should/ought to/must perceive nature, we remove the sense of obligation to interfere and withdraw the excessive connectedness with nature. She is establishing a sustainable boundary: to receive and to reciprocate gently without claiming herself a regent that governs nature or imposing cold and useless meanings on her works.
Installation views Installation views Installation views
Chen’s paintings often involve renderings of the imagined motion blurs of a moving objects. The composition of both dynamic and static visuals on one canvas can be read as a series of superimposed still frames from different realms or viewports, each derived from the overall progression of object’s movement. The drags and blurs and trails and tails can all be seen as vectors demonstrating the objects’ directions and magnitudes.
Her yearning for slowness defines her visual bond with nature. What is the rates of the earth clocks to ours? Can we ever compare its timepieces to our devices? Does the earth consider time divisible and differentiable? Does it use time to monitor societal progress? Does it measure anything at all? We are trained to handle between feelings of stress and inertia and start to recognise regular emotional switchings as reliable rhythmic transcriptions that examine our ability to cope. We are always running on clockwork. But Chen is hoping to slow down the movement of the world through her works, “the more gravity stretches out time, the slower time passes. I wish time moves with merciful slowness.”
External links:
Press release published on Gallery Func’s WeChat official account.
Photo documentation on the gallery’s Instagram page.
Review, “往生草木與賽博天堂——評‘陳若璠：慢鐘’”, by Jiatan Xiao, published online by ArtReview China.
Interview, “陳若璠：在屏幕中‘寫生’”, by Ziwei Wang, published online by Artnet China.
哈利
Somewhere in the fog / 霧下症狀
Clean noise / 靜噪
Time moves with merciful slowness... / 慢鐘
Under the gavel / 一聲千兩
The enduring ephemeral / 慢漫
Echoes of Mt. Qomolangma / 珠穆朗瑪的迴響
I spoke to them
Parallel
Blue cables in Venetian watercourse / 他山之石，新代理人
People’s Park Plinth
2. Public programmes
3. Writings
4. Translations
5. studio@DING
6. About
7. Chronological archive
Time moves with merciful slowness / 慢鐘
Ruofan Chen’s solo exhibition
at Gallery Func, Shanghai
from 4 Aug 2023 to 16 Sep 2023
Ruofan Chen’s solo exhibition
at Gallery Func, Shanghai
from 4 Aug 2023 to 16 Sep 2023
Exhibition text
Ruofan Chen’s solo exhibition, Time moves with merciful slowness, showed a selection of her latest paintings, sculptures and moving images. They were on view from 4 August to 16 September 2023 at Gallery Func in Shanghai which is now permanently closed.
The exhibition could be considered a constellation of portals that delivered audience to Chen’s differentiable manifolds represented by the trajectory of falling objects derived from her moving images, the viewports of digital construction of models and textures in her working files, the occurrences of motion blurs visualised through vector quantities such as wind and gravity, and the cache holding transcribed image data of various botanical specimens on canvas.
Most of Ruofan Chen’s new works then were based on one of her moving images, Botanical Bank: 54 Objects Transplanted. She continued in this exhibition the act of transplanting in an attempt to rehearse her version of time unaffected by gravity. It was an inquiry into the differentiability of meanings by her reimagining both dynamic and static incarnations of transplanted objects. As told by Chen, these plants were taken from Jinshanling and she often compared collecting plants from the nature to borrowing books from a library; there was not enough time to wander and she could only take a few. In Chen's moving image installation, the field forces - particularly, gravity and wind - in the virtual world were set up differently. She has also planted hair on some objects, inviting the audience to embrace the softness.
80 x 180 x 30 cm.
Here are some keywords: wind paths, falling/landing, emitter, grid, frame of reference, specimen, motion blur, cache. How selfish am I to interpret Chen’s images in terms of calculus or geometry due to my personal interest but I do think they have constituted a fascinating mathematical atlas! Chen's works appear to geometrise the mobility of materials. In her fiction, the axiomatic system of the real world is no longer a universal truth. Objects are allowed to edit themselves to some extent, for example, breaking free from the enforced falling condition and leaving traces of motion lags. As for us spectators, we seem incapable of following the objects and may rationalise our failure to recognise the objects’ autonomy. Thus can Chen’s images be read as fragmented memory cache of the objects when they develop changes like motion blurs? Nevertheless, Chen is demonstrating an act of exchange between the static grid or reference frame and the active projectiles.
We have nihilism on one hand and the rise of OOO on the other. Yet Chen’s creations are not burdened with pressure of clumsy meaning-making. She is encouraging us to remove the command-focused modal verbs when we attempt to understand nature; for example, instead of asking how we should/ought to/must perceive nature, we remove the sense of obligation to interfere and withdraw the excessive connectedness with nature. She is establishing a sustainable boundary: to receive and to reciprocate gently without claiming herself a regent that governs nature or imposing cold and useless meanings on her works.
Chen’s paintings often involve renderings of the imagined motion blurs of a moving objects. The composition of both dynamic and static visuals on one canvas can be read as a series of superimposed still frames from different realms or viewports, each derived from the overall progression of object’s movement. The drags and blurs and trails and tails can all be seen as vectors demonstrating the objects’ directions and magnitudes.
Her yearning for slowness defines her visual bond with nature. What is the rates of the earth clocks to ours? Can we ever compare its timepieces to our devices? Does the earth consider time divisible and differentiable? Does it use time to monitor societal progress? Does it measure anything at all? We are trained to handle between feelings of stress and inertia and start to recognise regular emotional switchings as reliable rhythmic transcriptions that examine our ability to cope. We are always running on clockwork. But Chen is hoping to slow down the movement of the world through her works, “the more gravity stretches out time, the slower time passes. I wish time moves with merciful slowness.”
External links:
Press release published on Gallery Func’s WeChat official account.
Photo documentation on the gallery’s Instagram page.
Review, “往生草木與賽博天堂——評‘陳若璠：慢鐘’”, by Jiatan Xiao, published online by ArtReview China.
Interview, “陳若璠：在屏幕中‘寫生’”, by Ziwei Wang, published online by Artnet China.