Li Zhenhua

Mum, Ghost and Hermits

During the COVID-19 pandemic moment, what would be your beloved, what would be the meaning to stay with friends, family or being alone. Since when have you had a qualified time for yourself, apart from work and social media or Netflix. Since when have you had to live with someone together every day?

I choose three states of mind, action and works during and before the crisis, by artists 9mouth, Daniel Knorr and JU Anqi. When you have to live with your mother and she came to see you by a night train from far away. Because of the vehicle of modern technology, people live much departed, in a same city or a different country. With social media or internet, people are much more connected in communities for communications or petitions but since when has private lives become public issues, or the public issues evolved with the private lives? We have to redefine the concept of being together and bring the communities and the petitions into the reality. How to stay with someone also can be understood as living together, as part of globalization cliché, but privately can you live with someone from your family or your friends, what is the community, what would be a correct discussion, anonymously with a mask on. when we could communicate equally with our identities, genders and races.

The tool of technology is leveled with different authorization rights.

1 I asked on my social media (WeChat) circle, if someone would remember one’s name and being together for the moment, 9mouth sent me a series of photos of his mother during the lock down in Wuhan, China. His father passed away for years. Since for a long time, he left the family and looking for his life in literature and photography, he paid so much time on communicating with women for their desire and expression in his artistic projects, as he said he became the lens of camera for them, for their true belief in their story and body. Eventually and occasionally, he turned the lens toward his mother with appreciation and love. The tender moment of his mother, completely changed the departed life in Beijing with a gentle touch of being together. His mother is a friend, a heroine, a kind person in his life, for him to re-encounter, through the lens and reality.

2 Are we haunted these days with the great paranoia of fear and horror? Are we live in the time of monsters? A ghost might only be seen by covered material to invent a form, what a metaphor from Daniel Knorr, after his empty Romania Pavilion in 2005 at Venice Biennale, and his smoke of the Expiration Movement in 2017 at Kassel for Documenta14. How can we describe the situation today, how much do we know about the COVID-19 virus, how people died or were cured, or just vanished in life? How much do we know about the economic setback, the stock market and inflation, restrained life and payback in the future, and the invisible deals that are signed between politicians and company leaders. Do we get a clue of what’s really going on? Or we know everything but we do not know how to intervene. I see the ghosts comes, from the past, from the future, and from now.

3 Will you still find hermits in China? Follow the road of Bill Porter (Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits). How can people co-exist today with the change of our social structure and cities, the way of being is challenged in many ways, if the Bitcoin Revolution could bring you money. By working hard in the field, who would not make a barrel of gold from the stock market, or is it actually cheaper to buy food from the supermarket? To live or die, to get a moment in the valley or a rural field sounds so luxury and special, except the situation of living in the polluted places, desertification landscape, or highly condensed human cities. As well as poverty, fires, or a virus pandemic as today. But people might need to think and follow nature, go into the past, be in the mountains with JU Anqi, be there or elsewhere, it might help us to re-think for now and possible future.

4 Through the three states of mind from 9mouth, Daniel Knorr and JU Anqi, learn how to stay with your mother in a narrow space, learn to think the form of today as a ghost, learn how to be spiritual away in the mountains. If the virus cannot stop us or take us away, then we can try to live with better imaginations, be kind to people, be nice to plants or animals, think think think, work work work til tomorrow.

a curatorial note by Li Zhenhua in the COVID-19 pandemic time

Daniel Knorr

At first glance, the ghost-like sculptures appear playful. The Ghosts are pure white figures and objects that are very light yet have a certain weight and seriousness at the same time. The small-sized fabric is fused into a solid polyester blanket that conveys the impression that it has been filled, lifted, and shaped by an invisible force. The artist created objects that look like living beings or appear to have been covered by magic, things that seem to embody something transcendent and invisible.

short bio: Daniel Knorr is a contemporary Romanian artist known for his projects that employ materials such as cocaine, casts of pot holes and smoke, to trigger debates on political and theoretical content. He represented Romania in the 2005 Venice Biennale with his work European Influenza. In 2017, his multifaceted “Expiration Movement”, debuted at documenta 14 in both Kassel and Athens. Knorr continues to live and work in Berlin, Germany and Hong Kong. Today, his works are held in numerous private and public collections like Migros Museum, Zurich, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Lenbachhaus and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, among others.