ALICE CHANNER
A series of white silk satin drops from the ceiling to the floor to form Alice Channer's sculpture Tight Skin (all works 2011). Channer's silk or metal objects are roughly cut and edgeless; this is an artist who hates hemlines and finishes, which can weigh her fabrics and sculptures down to the floor. Suspended from the ceiling, nailed to the wall, weightless on a shelf, or hanging in space, everything here seems suspended - like a corpse floating in water, or the idea of being trapped in mid-air forever. My second work was hugely inspired by this, and I was thinking about the fact that the form in which my subject is exhibited is actually about scarred skin injuries of this sort. It made me think about the idea of huge wounds trapped in mid-air. It feels like when you have experienced some kind of painful injury, in fact it's like a body or a wound that is trapped in mid-air, that you might let go of but you can't forget.
DORIS SALCEDO
「Shibboleth」by Doris Salcedo
Created by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, she has created a 548 ft (167 m) long winding crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall. This work divides the floor of the Tate Gallery in London into two, a huge crack 548 feet (167 metres) long.
One end of the fissure is extremely thin, while the other widens to about a few inches wide and two feet deep, signifying a border, the common experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. That is the experience of third world people coming to the heart of Europe. Just as the space occupied by illegal immigrants is a negative space, so this work will be a negative space (negative space). This rift will eventually become a scar (of the museum). The author's expression of racial immigration is in fact equivalent to two very sharp contradictions. The use of the fissure is actually a very simple, straightforward and powerful way of expressing this contradiction.
In my understanding the rift is actually a huge split. It can be used to express the contradiction between relationship and relationship, adding an additional layer of reflection on reality. This Hebrew word comes from a biblical allusion and means an indicator that can be used to distinguish a person's social or regional background. The rift in the turbine hall is thus a metaphor for the foreigners who cross the border and are identified as different from others and die because of it. This crack, which seems to be left by the movement of the earth's crust, is an implicit and powerful metaphor for global political and cultural upheaval. Chalked draws attention to the lumpy and brutal violence of the treatment of dissent in an age that is surging forward.
「A Flor de Piel/SkinDeep」by Doris Salcedo
A Flor de Piel/SkinDeep, 2014, is a thin dark red blanket of preserved rose petals stitched together, sprawled out on the floor, its delicate stitching and the texture of the petals clearly perceptible and delicate to break. Salcedo dedicates it to a Colombian nurse who was kidnapped and then ravaged to death.
The stories are heavy and poignant, full of blood and tears, and redefine the viewer's visual impressions: the steel bars erected like tombstones, the niches with shoes an altar, and the petal carpet a blood-red birthday suit. However, what is remarkable about Chalcedo is not just the memory of tragedy, but also her calm and restrained abstraction of suffering. Although each creation is accompanied by years of research, travel and combing, the viewer does not see any names or statistics of the victims. Moreover, apart from brief explanations on the walls and commentary from art critics, there is little emphasis or sensationalism on suffering in the artworks themselves. In other words, these works can be established independently of the viewer's knowledge of the specific story.
Sharsetto's lament is mournful but not sad, and no one weeps. It is as if she is aware that she cannot heal the wounds, or even clarify the questionable history behind each event, but rather she discreetly brushes aside the grief, conveying a basic sense of presence, an emotional response and some hope.
The expression of these sad songs without being sad is something I have always sought in my own work. In many works of art many people will express this theme for the sake of being sad. This is what is commonly known as pushing too hard. In fact, it is often more powerful to express such themes in a calm or simple poetic way. Here are my thoughts on this piece.
LUCY SKAER
Lucy Skaer created the drawings, which include rhythmic black spiral grids, graphic shapes and additional patterns filled with graphite, like a tapestry. She pieced together different early drawings and used several assistants to complete the tedious, repetitive work. Here we see a drawing on paper on an architectural scale. There is a tension between the intricate, repetitive detail in the graphite and the shift in physical scale towards a larger, healthier frame.
TOBA KHEOORI
Khedoori's work contains intricate details, models or architectural renderings set in wide sheets of waxed paper or linen. This subtle combination often requires close viewing, which results in the work filling the viewer's entire field of vision. In recent years, Khedoori's work has introduced reversals of the more common black details on large white sheets, incorporating natural imagery and landscapes, and has also taken the form of smaller scale works than those produced to date.
As most of my paintings are of a more detailed and realistic style, I have focused on her previous works, which have inspired me in many ways with their precise rendering and intricate lines. In particular, these works depict familiar objects out of any context. Over the past twenty years she has created her own atlas of lonely spaces, windows, doors, train carriages and horizons that are always devoid of human presence. Often drawn on paper, sometimes on paper, the otherwise empty compositions envelop the viewer's entire field of vision, but their proportions seem independent of real-life references. These works are at once fragile and monumental, prosaic and unreal.
ZENG