For contemporary urban dwellers, the perception of ruins is no longer based on romantic remnants of broken walls against an epic backdrop of historical narratives, but rather on the demolished buildings that surround us in the aftermath of the rapid urban development, the liminal spaces between the utopia and the dystopia. In this exhibition What is A Real Life, artist Tong Wenmin uses her body as a connection between the external environment and her personal perception to explore the intricate relationships between the architectural space, the literary space, the emotional space, and the spiritual ruins overlapping multiple dimensions.
Gaston Bachelard in his famous book The Poetics of Space proposes that space is not merely a container for objects, but rather the dwelling place of the human soul. When a space is imbued with time and memory, its physical existence gradually transcends to an interactive field where living beings engage with the outside world, interweaving the sensual and the spiritual. If a home symbolizes the spiritual realm of an individual, then the public space would aggregate the collective emotions of a community or even the collective memories of an entire generation. When an architecture cease to exist, it is not just the loss of material labor, but the dissipation of intangible memories. In a way, Tong’s constant quests over the essence of life stems fundamentally from her existential concern: how do we co-exist and rebuild our spiritual ruins left after the drastic changes of life? The ruins also seem to provide a new form of ecological relationship, behind which the confrontation between the human and the nature softens. In the works of Tong, the ruins are transformed from the desolated void into the milestone of urban evolutionary, a place where life is reborn.
In Chongqing Weeds, Tong meticulously gathered and identified neglected urban flora over a year, rendering them on ceramic tablets fired at 1000°C before mounting them on rusted steel plates holding up with vein-like stands. These organisms thriving amidst the decay become the witnesses of urban development, their fragile yet tenacious surfaces documenting the recurring rebirth of civilization in threshold.
As humans, we instinctively position ourselves as the center of our surroundings, however, this exhibition invites us to shift our perspectives: exacting the human context from the center of an architecture, it will cease to be the human tool, instead the ruins become the autonomous agent. In Tong Wenmin’s long-lasting performative engagements with the urban environment, she has many times transformed these once-humanized spaces into alienated non-spaces. In As if Gone from the World, Tong enters the space painted all in black. Her body becomes a sensory instrument to experience rather than to interpret the space in time. The texture and the scale of the surrounding are magnified, each dust particle turns subtly into a new energy field. The former inhabit of the building has turned into an intruder, an insignificant phantom haunting over her own past. This inversion exposes the relative human-space connection, challenging the traditional anthropocentric paradigms. As Tong deepens her engagement with the ruins, their multidimensional existence also reveal: for outsiders living on the margins, the ruins are their unremarkable daily habitats. Those who are left behind in the waves of urbanization and those architectural that are demolished in ruins, they resonate to each other.
Tong Wenbin’s artistic practices are rooted in the time she lives and the life she experiences. Both leave emotional imprint like the humid weather of her own hometown that gives birth to many splendid things on the ruins within and beyond life itself. As we follow her art and enter the ruins hidden underneath the glossy surface of modern cityscape, the question she asks through this exhibition is clearly beyond the architecture per se. The question is fundamental existential: What is a real life?
Curator: Zheng Guo