沈少民的科学简史｜深圳当代艺术家系列之三

沈少民的作品主题涉及20世纪后半叶的科学巨变，大庆油田的工业跃进，航空航天的飞天梦想，生物自然科学的突变，深圳高新产业的兴起。创作的材料，有动物、骨骼、海盐、树木、标本、图纸、测量工具、大型工业机械、日常家电、生物意识、计算机、机器人、飞行器、人脸识别、虚拟技术等，涉猎艺术、诗歌、历史、纪录片、声音、科学和技术等学科，这些纷杂的词汇，时代的变革，像一部自20世纪初未来主义的百科全书，创作了属于个人所独有的科学简史。

本次展览聚焦于沈少民近几年的创作，围绕艺术、诗歌和科学三个领域展开，既延续了2000年后沈少民在中国艺术界最早对艺术与科学关系的探索，又呈现了他独树一帜的跨学科视野，语法的持续变革，幽默的观念诘问和浪漫主义的诗性语言。

展览的主题，取自80年代风靡一时的《中国科学技术史》，李约瑟编撰的这本长达几十年的巨著，掀起了一场 “科学热”，让西方人了解中国古代的科学与文明之间的丰富关系，也成为科学是不同文明共同创造的具体例证。广泛的人文主义热情、科研精神、哲学思考、艺术启蒙、遍布诗人的岁月，成为这一代人理想的写照。

80年代的精神，终在市场化和专业化的分工中结束，各领域开始闭门造车和独自前行。对艺术、诗歌、科学之间的差异性的强调，取代了彼此的校对和启示，学科之间的对立和反思也逐渐消失。让我们试想，如果将 “想象力”、“创造力” 和 “无用” 的意义，在艺术、诗歌、科学三个领域中进行单独的思考，它们之间的历史似乎毫无关联，每个学科都以谈论自身的特殊性，作为走向未来的理由。然而，在沈少民的科学简史中，这些不同学科对于 “想象力” 和 “无用” 的思考得以链接，彼此含混、校对、辩驳和反思，成为彼此的他者和标尺。

《沈少民的科学简史》亦是一部感知和反思的历史，它以艺术剧场和诗歌短句的方式，将那些分属于不同时代的科学与技术重新审视，构成一部昨日、今日与未来的时空剧场。迷宫的尽头，AI算法模拟了观众自己与自己的告别，镜像和现实有着一样的真实与虚拟。两把一样的巨型卷尺，丈量着彼此的长度，像是个体注定的旅途，审视、怀疑，而又充满坚定的信念，周而复始。当用圆珠笔画圆珠笔，用铅笔画铅笔，用很多个自己画自己，再次揭示了自我的矛盾性。两组空调，也有相似的情境，人为的控制自然，在不同空间中却带来了两种极端的天气和性格。制冷与散热的相互抵消，最终让一切变的徒劳。在展览的尾声，退役的机器人，见证了科技革命的兴起，也注定成为变革的代价，像是时代巨变中被遗忘的人和物，“无聊” 而又 “无用” 的动作，成为科学与创造的挽歌。

“诗歌” 和 “艺术” 成为沈少民切入科学简史的支点和目光，他将科学和技术的故事拟人化，用艺术和诗歌的 “无用” 审视着科技的实用性和有效性，以诗歌和艺术中的虚无感和怀疑主义，调侃坚信科技进步的乐观主义。同样，他以科学猜想中抽象的想象力，以科学史的发明实验中那些弯路、错误、光怪陆离的失败实验，反视艺术中所谓的创造力和实验性。沈少民以其一贯的观念互博和辩证，重申 “无用”、“想象” 和 “可能性” 作为一种浪漫的雄心，一份奇想而又无与伦比的柔情，对于人的精神含义。

沈少民的科学简史亦是关于理想的讨论，人类明日的许诺，意义的 “徒劳” 与 “消耗” 的反思。最终，在艺术的想象中，这部个人的科学简史，这场积极的徒劳，有了一个浪漫、抒情、无用的诗人肖像，让未来不在 “实用” 中死去。

策展人  崔灿灿

 

 

Pingshan Art Museum | Shenzhen Contemporary Artists Series | Prelude

Making History and Making Endeavors

 

The development of contemporary art in Shenzhen can be traced back to as early as 85 New Wave period. At that time, as a burgeoning and imaginative city, Shenzhen gave birth to some sporadic art movements and individual practices. However, Shenzhen then was obligated to undertake the mission of conducting experiments and thereby working miracles in the economic and political fields. As a result, culture and art were emerging, with dramatic growth yet to come.

Until 1997, Shenzhen witnessed the building and opening of He Xiangning Art Museum and Guan Shanyue Art Museum in the same year. Contemporary art in Shenzhen has shown an increasingly clear academic positioning, while demonstrating the rise and vitality of Pearl River Delta in the contemporary art context. In 2005, OCAT, initiated by Huang Zhuan among others, was formally established in Shenzhen, marking the awakening of the subjective consciousness of contemporary art in Shenzhen. It can be concluded that Shenzhen position and its independent efforts concerning Chinese contemporary art have helped facilitate the academic research and value construction of Chinese contemporary art. At this stage, the contemporary art in Shenzhen has also witnessed the sprouting of non-indigenous and events-based art when a surprising number of biennales came out. Objectively speaking, the series of practices loosened and cultivated the soil for contemporary art in Shenzhen, while promoting and shaping the basic appearance of the development of contemporary art in Shenzhen today.

Against this backdrop, Pingshan Art Museum was established as the times demanded. Over the past two years of work, we have been emphasizing historical perspectives, contemporary pivots and prudent judgment, which should play a role in the construction of contemporary art scenes and local art. Based on the realistic situation and development stage of contemporary art in Shenzhen, the Shenzhen Contemporary Artists Series is expected to promote the major construction of contemporary art in Shenzhen by means of inspiring, assisting and inheriting acts. We hope to present the structure and texture of Shenzhen contemporary art through the analysis of individual cases. The richer the texture, the greater intellectual thickness and potential the city will have.

The contemporary art in Shenzhen presents a state of individual migration and frequent movement, which prompts the definition of “Shenzhen Contemporary Artists”. Among them are the artists Liang Quan and Zhou Li who have been involved into the field for 20 or 30 years, Jiang Zhi who went north after the momentous years of starting out a career as an artist in Shenzhen, as well as Li Liao born in 1980s. Besides, the said artists also include Xue Feng who has left school and moved to Shenzhen, and Shen Shaomin, who treats Shenzhen as a temporary place of lodging like a migratory bird. We categorize them as Shenzhen contemporary artists for inspection, sorting and exhibiting. Certainly, we are aware that the judgment itself will promote the infrastructure construction of the local art ecology on the one hand, which also means that this work will be full of challenges and hardships. However, we firmly believe that the shenzhen contemporary art today needs to be reviewed, sorted out and examined concerning its short yet rich history, thus resulting in observations of and judgments on the scene here and now. Should the contemporary art in Shenzhen advance, it needs some self-examination and adventure.

I recall that the late Huang Zhuan, an important promoter of contemporary art in Shenzhen and an art critic, said: “Not all times can go down in history. Only those times that have truly changed the value of our lives can make history; not everyone can go down in history. Only those who are genuinely able to produce creations can pass into history.” Pingshan Art Museum is looking for those “changes” and “creations”, while weaving them into the narrative of Shenzhen contemporary art. We hope to build some solid and time-honored “infrastructure” for Shenzhen and for the contemporary art ecology in southern China.

Liu Xiaodu, Director of Pingshan Art Museum
Zhong Gang, Editor of Readers of Shenzhen Contemporary Artists Series

 

 

Shaomin Shen’s Brief History of Science

As one of the artists featured in the Shenzhen Contemporary Artists Series, Shen Shaomin seems to have different trajectory. Before growing his fame in the post-2000 Asia-Pacific contemporary art world, his unique journey started to unfold back in the 1950s when he was born in a northeast province of China, an area known for heavy industry. Then he moved to Beijing in the late 1980s, and migrated to Australia in the early 1990s, where he stayed for around 10 years before coming back to Beijing after 2000. With his representative works such as “Bone Series” and “Kowtow Pump” created in Daqing, Heilongjiang Province, Shen has participated in multiple highly-recognized biennial exhibitions, thus gaining the reputation as the vanguard artist of “large-scale installation” and “new material” in China. In 2015, he went to Guangzhou and then settled in Shenzhen 3 years ago, where he established the Joint Laboratory of Science and Art with the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society.

The themes of Shen’s works reflect great scientific changes taking place in the second half of the 20th century, including the industrial leap of Daqing Oilfield, the rapid development of aerospace technologies, the emergence of natural sciences, as well as the rise of high-tech industries in Shenzhen. He used a wide spectrum of materials to visualize his art, including animals, bones, sea salt, trees, specimens, drawings, measuring tools, large industrial machinery, daily household appliances, biological consciousness, computers, robots, aircraft, face recognition technology, and virtual technology covering various disciplines ranging from art, poetry, history, documentary, sound, to science and technology. The complex elements involved epitomize the evolution of our times, compiling an encyclopedia of futurism starting from the very beginning of the 20th century, and his unique individual brief history of science.

This exhibition shed a spotlight on Shen’s creations in recent years, focusing on three fields, art, poetry and science, which not only extends his early exploration of the relationship between art and science in China after the millennium, but also presents the artist’s unique interdisciplinary perspective and expression, consistent evolution of his artistic language as well as humorous interrogations around concepts and poetic odes for romanticism.

The exhibition took the theme from “Science and Civilization in China”, a popular book initiated and edited by Joseph Needham in the 1980s and it took him several decades to finish it. The “science mania” ignited by this masterpiece allowed Westerners to peek into the relationship between science and civilization in ancient China, evidently testifying science as a co-creation of different civilizations. The broad enthusiasm behind humanism, the passion for scientific research, together with the philosophical inspiration, artistic enlightenment, and poetic lifestyle back then are woven into the ideals for the current generation.

The cultural blossom of the 1980s finally withered due to marketization and industrial specialization when various fields began to move forward in silos. The emphasis on the differences among art, poetry, and science eclipsed the interaction and inspiration in between and invalidated interdisciplinary antagonisms and reflections. If we were to put “imagination”, “creativity” and “futility” separately in art, poetry and science, with no latent relationship being considered, then each discipline would only develop based on its own particularity. However, in Shen’s brief history of science, all thoughts about “imagination” and “futility” are interconnected, obscuring, calibrating, refuting and reflecting on each other, thus becoming each other’s reference.

“Shen Shaomin’s Brief History of Science” is also a history of perception and reflection. By re-examining science and technology of different times in the form of artistic repertoire and short poems, he’s created a theater arching over the past, present and future. At the end of the maze, the AI algorithm simulates the audience’s farewell to themselves, blurring the fine line between the virtual and real. Two identical giant rulers measure each other’s lengths along destined tracks, with firm beliefs, relentlessly scrutinizing and doubting each other. A picture of a ballpoint pen was drawn with ballpoint pens. And a picture of a pencil was drawn with pencils. Likewise, a picture of us can only be finished with ourselves, which once again reveals the contradictory nature of “self”. It’s also true for the two groups of air conditioners. Artificial control of nature brings two kinds of extreme weather and personalities in different spaces, where the offset of cooling and heating makes every effort in vain. At the exit of the exhibition, retired robots, as the cost of revolution, are witnessing the iteration of technology. They were left behind by the times, with their “monotonous” and “futile” movements composing an elegy for science and innovation of the past.

“Poetry” and “art” have become the fulcrum and lighthouse for Shen Shaomin’s entry into the brief history of science. By personifying the story of science and technology, the artist examines the scientific practicality and effectiveness with the “futility” of art and poetry, whose nihilism and skepticism also ridicule the optimism in the progress of science and technology. Meanwhile, with the abstract imagination in scientific conjectures, and with all the detours, mistakes, and bizarrely-failed experiments in the history of science, he reflected on the so-called creativity and experimentation in art. Shen Shaomin reiterates the spiritual significance of “futility”, “imagination” and “possibility” as a kind of romantic ambition and a whimsical and unparalleled tenderness with his consistent concepts and dialectics.

Shen Shaomin’s Brief History of Science is also a discussion of ideals, a promise to human’s future, the “futility” of meaning and the reflection on “consumption”. Ultimately, in the artistic imagination, this personal brief history of science, this proactive futility delineates a romantic, lyrical, useless portrait of a poet preventing the future from dying in “utility”.

Cui Cancan, Curator