Circular, 2022
This art practice is at once an exploration and articulation of nature space. It abstractly discusses the relation between land, plants and humans by centering the focus and through the round shapes. To maintain my main idea: everything comes from the earth, the land and it’s just in different ways or different forms. The energy of the plants shows the infinity of death and alive, which also gives a connection between spiritual and natural world.
When I'm making art, I feel art should point out a problem and make people actually think about it, or give an ironic / artistic solution to the problem. For this major art project, I pointed out the connection and relation between people, plants and nature.
At the beginning stage, while with my interest in architecture, I realized most of the modern architecture is box-shape with concrete materials, which lost the organic feeling and disconnected with nature. Sometimes I felt people just forgot the fact that nothing we have actually belongs to us, it should all belong to the nature, the land and the earth. I tried to make people find “organic” circles in the concrete box which is the Audain Art Centre. The outcome looks like an indoor floating garden.
One of the biggest tests is while installing this work, all the canvas are not parallel to the ground when I first hang them on the ceiling. After several tests with the help of Andy, I solved this problem and started thinking about the distance between each of them and the distance of the high from the ground. I love when I place them relatively separately, because it allows people to walk through them and to look at the plants or the paintings closely. This also represented one of my ideas: the beauty of nature is really close to us if we could just take time and observe carefully. There’s a quotation by Dorothea Lange I really like, he said: “the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera” and I believe art is a way to make people start thinking about everything around us.
In terms of the images that I paint on the canvas, three out of the six are different color blanks and the other three have images which separately represent three of people’s main basic needs: house, food and clothing. I did use lots of lines on the painting to represent the texture of plants, therefore, make the images on the canvas blend into the plants on them. Continuing with the idea from the small magic project of representing the anthropocene by unreal, plastic-ish color, but I spend more time on the choice of the plants. There are only three different plants on the painted big canvas, the choice of plants stuck with the meaning of the images, either landscape plants or edible plants (cabbage) or plants mainly for natural soap (to wash clothes). Some people mentioned, there’s a feeling of agriculture in the critique which I found really interesting and I’d love to say that my work could give this kind of feeling to others.
Because of the distance, the height in this open space, I think it offers and invites people to come close and walk around in this installation. For me, it makes me feel calm and comfortable. I used round canvases instead of regular canvas not only because I want to represent the earth or give an organic feeling, but also to show the idea of the infinity circle and represent whatever people do to nature will come back to themselves at the end.
