What is left in the wake of destruction - the flood of information?
Tungur// 舌头[Like an Open Book] the fourth installation in the TextBook Art series (2023 - 2024.) A kind of meditation on the limits of words and data. Especially concerning the things that cut the closest to people's hearts.
Those mysterious things inside people's hearts that don't always make it off the tongue.
Exhibited in a small wooden house in CPI, Luxelakes, Chengdu, as a part of the artists six-week residency A4 Residency Art Center and the Re-Create 2024 art festival, the installation consists of a small house, furnished with furniture sourced from local Chengdu antique markets, and a bed of paper fortune-tellers created from re-cycled textbooks, donations from a local university, from used bookstores and donations from community members.
Tungur is information is rendered useless, books taken apart as they are put together using a different kind of knowledge: shared childhood memories of playing games, of making these paper things at school or on the playground.
From shape to shape.
The theme for the A4 Artists Residency Art Center's 2024 Residency program was the question: How to discuss Sustainability sustainably? The idea for Tungur developing from there. The artist's thinking about cycles (and re-cycling.) Once the text books are taken apart, and are recycled, at what point can does that particular process become a different process? From shape to shape, data to art, to coherence to incoherence to something resembling coherence again, in stages, creation, re-creation and destruction. Making art or making a mess: it's not always easy to tell these things a part.
A table, a basket and chairs at the entrance. A canvas at the other ed f the room. Visitors could place their own paper fortune-tellers inside the house, next to another piece of paper, or into the basket. Those in the basket were then tacked on to a canvas by the artists, who visited the cabin daily for the duration of the two-week long festival, slowly adding paper on canvas until completing the "painting" on closing day of the festival. Mixing up beginning and ending, organic growth and participation and control by the artists. Similarly, in a small wooden house by a lake, bombarded with visitors and participants of all ages, animals, and the natural elements, the installation actually shrunk and sustained damages just as much (if not more) than grew sometimes. Growing as it dissolves. Being put together as it decays. Like a living thing.
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Memory Crease: 东南西北
no translation necessary
The title, and subtitles: deliberate mis-translations. The English subtitle having nothing to do with the Icelandic word and Chinese character for Tongue but a reference to the idea that people's hearts, like books, if opened can fall apart,
And then what secrets come spilling out...?
Maybe that thing that usually won't make it off the tongue.
Even if the words don't make sense - and you can ask any student - none of it makes sense if you stare at a page long enough - that mysterious thing is understood. And how many of those students ever though about destroying their school books? Doodled on them. Like a force of nature. Violent. Destructive. Creative. Like a flood.
A very special thanks to all contributors to this works and to the A4 Residency Art Center's staff for all their support.
Love,
Saga Unn.
