Love with "invalid production" splicing as "consumables"

In this somewhat special spring, contemporary artist Yang Mushi welcomed his first exhibition "Single-Sided Splicing" in South China at K11 in Guangzhou.

At the end of February 2022, he left his home in Shanghai early for solo exhibitions in Guangzhou and Beijing, and lived in different budget hostels for nearly two months. In the past two years, Yang Mushi has traveled to 7 cities, done 72 nucleic acids, and been "pop-ups" at different railway stations and airports. Born in 1989 and graduated from the Department of Sculpture of Central American, Yang Mushi can almost recite art history backwards, but chooses to "leave behind" the creative paradigms and colors he has learned, leaving only the geometric blocks that have been decolored. He regains his small, forgotten tools and encloses himself in a remote factory, hoping to reconnect the invisible people and things, events, and the world through the near-limit grinding of the body.

Love and pain

Thousands of days of protracted "confrontation" and "wear and tear"

Watching Yang Mushi's works, it is easy to produce a tingling sensation. In "Illumination", the white neon boxes are lined up, shaking the eyes and hurting; in "Single-Sided Splicing", the sharp black geometry like bullets is lined up in a row, and it hurts people as soon as they get closer.

This "pain" is not only the feeling of the viewer, but also runs through Yang Mushi's creative process. In 2013, he wandered around the city, wandering through scrap stations, factories, libraries, and office buildings, collecting "materials" between networks. For three years, he shut himself off in a remote factory and "clocked in" to work like a worker every day, digesting what was happening from all over the world while dealing with materials.

For the details of creation, Yang Mushi is very paranoid. "Which part is cut wrong, which tip is to be redone after bumping, which material cannot be spliced." It is his summary of his work in the past decade.

After thousands of days of protracted "confrontation" and "wear and tear", the discarded tools are sharpened into black geometry of different proportions. These black geometries, like bullets and tears, and like Stonehenge, mountains and contemporary architecture, envelop the reality of the moment.

During that time, Yang Mushi threw himself into high-intensity labor every day. Noise, dust, paint... Under the rapidly moving serrations, he needs extreme concentration, and if he is not careful, he may cut off one of his fingers. Yang Mushi described that time as "painful and consuming", also known as "love".

"Love is a consumable." Yang Mushi explained that this kind of love is in a broad sense and involves personal expectations of society. In the discipline of society, homogenization is a common thing. The concept of "individual" gradually disappeared, and some were sharpened into peaks, and some were alienated into bullets and turned into useless tools.

Born in Shangrao, Jiangxi, he was born in Shanghai from the age of half a year to 18 and in Beijing from the ages of 19 to 24, during which time he worked in Huangshan, Nantong, Boye and Jingdezhen. The experience of traveling between seven cities allowed Yang Mushi to extend his thinking to the urban landscape. The "single-sided splicing" on this exhibition is a broader material experiment conducted by Yang Mushi. "The materials come from different sites, homes, factories, hospitals, schools and office buildings. There is a history behind them, a record of the glory and shame of an era. He said.

rebel

He left behind the most basic and even extreme "ineffective production"

If you want to summarize Yang Mushi's way of working, you can summarize it in four words: "decolorization", "de-forming", "de-material sense", and "de-concept".

It was a rebellion against the academics. In 2008, Yang Mushi just entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and in the collective education of professional universities, he was "baptized" by the Socialist Realist painting and sculpture of the Soviet Union. He once thought that after graduation, he would be able to become an "artistic master" who created works on historical themes. At that time, the shaping of form and the handling of color relations were his strong points.

In 2011, he began to think in practice: What is "good" to do well? What are the rules for "good looking" backs?

With these questions, Yang Mushi threw himself into a lot of learning and material experiments. In 2012, he began looking for some new ways to do things: collect some scrap and attach the color directly. After another year, he noticed that the materials had become sharp and charming after being cut.

Abandoning a certain method or position that is easy to succeed, Yang Mushi returned to the original place. He processed some of the shapes, colors, and initial functions of the material, leaving behind the most basic and even some extreme "ineffective production". What he makes doesn't conform to the mainstream: neither red nor cute; neither contemporary nor conceptual.

Yang Mushi said that from the cutting of shapes and the confirmation of colors to the collection and processing of materials, the whole process is "very depressing". He hopes to stimulate the viewer's experience and reflection through the establishment of tension in space. "The process is like 'Jiang Taigong fishing.'"

splicing

"The provenance of various materials is of interest to me"

When introducing works, Yang Mushi always likes to return to the body, from art to people themselves.

"These things I do have to do with space, with the individual." The materials collected by Yang Mushi are partly from the lives of ordinary people and belong to daily tools. The working method he chose is also basic, and ordinary people can complete it. "I'm just sorting out a particular way of observing and generalizing it."

And "stitching" is the main way he handles it. Splicing-Door is a re-cut and stitched composition of collected old door panels, the edges of the object are deformed, and the stale and splicing traces on the surface of the material are worn away and sprayed with black paint. He twisted the neon tube and created "Inward-Duan" based on electrocardiograms, stock market indices, and fund fluctuations.

In the "Welding Connection" series, he cut the collection of wall guardrails, anti-theft windows, sculptural skeletons, billboards, company nameplates, and stainless steel doors into different sizes. This is followed by re-welding of objects between sculptures, installations and buildings in local processes such as extrusion, elongation and sharpening.

"The provenance of all kinds of materials is of interest to me." Yang Mushi once said in an interview with the media that the relationship between people, things and things in different eras can be found from the origin of different materials. When these associations are misplaced and stitched together, variation occurs. For example, the traces left on the surface of the workbench can read the labor trajectory of the workers, the uneven glow of the white neon lights can observe the signs of prosperity in the early 21st century, and the tension and uneasiness of urban residents can be intercepted from the scratches of stainless steel window railings.

Among them, some works present a straight structure that shrinks inwards. The divisions that mirror the current reality: the epidemic is still continuing, and the international community has more disputes, decay and war.

"When all kinds of things slowly shrink or develop inward, I hope that more people can gradually explore inward and start from self-improvement." Yang Mushi said, "It's like going back to the beginning of 2020, learning to cook for the first time, quietly reading a book, reflecting on the relationship between the individual, art and life." ”

Written by: Nandu reporter Wang Meisu intern Chen Wuhong

Photo: Nandu reporter He Yushuai Some of the images are provided by Yang Mushi, Mailer Gallery and Guangzhou K11