At the beginning of the pandemic, Dooling watched 16 hours a day in the news to learn all the minutiae about the pandemic. On February 18, she marked the day, the valuable news became less, it seemed that the attention was superfluous, but the 16-hour reading volume had increased the appetite, and suddenly the brain became a vacuum, and she felt that she needed a lot of sharp words to fill, "you have to read the words like nails to react to the brain."
Every day she sent some book excerpts to her circle of friends, Nietzsche, Gandhi, Mandeville, Francis Bacon, Hippocrates, Virginia Woolf, Ango Sakaguchi, Heidegger... It seems to exhaust the achievements of thousands of years of civilization.
In addition, there is no anxiety, "human beings are bound to face such things, but human beings will not be destroyed because of such things." Unable to go out according to the rules, and occasionally going downstairs to take out the garbage, Dooling saw a large hedgehog crawling slowly through the aisle. She felt that after people withdrew, the world seemed to be a better place. As she excerpted from Darwin's On the Origin of Species, "nature" chooses only for the benefit of the creatures it protects.
Dooling Jiang is an independent designer and founder of Digest Design
AB="Art Business"
DL=Dooling Jiang
AB: The epidemic is indeed like a mirror, illuminating a lot of social problems, what aspects do you think we need to reflect on and improve?
DL: Don't be too greedy, whether it's getting or outputting, just do moderate things. It is very reasonable to feel more and more that the ancient Chinese people have always emphasized moderation. Because Chinese civilization is long enough, it has experienced a lot of things, it knows that it should not be like this, it should not be like that, and finally it has become moderate. It's just that this way can be more sustainable, and while it may seem slow, it's the best way to get along with the world.
AB: What is your view of globalization after the pandemic?
DL: Globalization is not going to end, but it shouldn't be so crazy, it's still moderate, and there will be global action. Instead of turning all actions into vision, because action is action, vision is vision, vision you can see, but it does not mean that you have to turn all the parts you see into yours.
Caesar said "I came, I saw, I conquered", I felt like a heroic act, he was indeed a great person, like Napoleon, or Qin Shi Huang, they were a very powerful individual, with their strong consciousness and execution to do "I came, I saw, I conquered". The world needed such people at that time, but their fates were all tragic, a bit like conservation of energy, and in a short period of time they had accomplished what they had done on their own. Such a person cannot become a model for everyone, or even a negative teaching material.
AB: Does it have an impact on you?
DL: We're actually fine, not the kind of studios that scale up. I heard friends in Shanghai say that they also make clothing, and soon they come online and do live broadcasting, because they have a large number of customers, a large number of VIPs, and the impact of this category is not so big. It is more difficult for people who have just started a business, or do not have a certain customer base, and the goods in the spring will definitely be backlogged this year, and they will certainly not sell well last year, but they may not be completely unsold. I think it can be carried over, and it can't be carried over to prove that you don't have this strength either.
"Digest Three Miles" 2020 fashion show at Bulgari
AB: You do clothing, but you have a lot to do with the art industry.
DL: When I was in college, I was interested in contemporary art, just based on a few people, like Boyce, and I liked him because he did research, he would study Germanic mythology. One of his works is How to Explain Painting to the Dead Rabbit, because rabbits are in charge of fertility in the Germanic mythological system, including the use of deer horns, which have a source.
I'm interested in creators who think at the root, whether they're writers or contemporary artists, or classical artists, or fashion designers, no matter what profession, as long as they have root thinking, or have a desire for roots. I think that people have desires, but some people's desires are non-rooted, just sensory stimulation-type desires, so I will directly block them.
Contemporary art is almost 100 years old if it is counted from Duchamp, and it was really flourishing in the 60s and 70s, starting from New York. There is still a lot of "slag" inside, muddy waters, just like China's fashion industry just rose this time.
But it cannot be denied that there was something more violent in the early days, which is what I mean by more fundamental. I will like contemporary art, but I will not like it in large quantities. Boyce was a research figure I researched when I was writing my papers at university. I make costumes, but I'm researching Boyce as a person, not contemporary art.
At that time, he made a suit out of felt, which I thought was too good to look at. I knew he wasn't trying to make a set of clothes, and felt had some conceptual stuff for him, and I started reading all his books and works through the work of this set of felt clothes, which I did when I was about 20 years old, my junior year.
Joseph Boyce in a Felt Suit
AB: Did he have a deep influence on your designs?
DL: Not really, because he's also a sculptor, and clothing is a kind of sculpture. I can only say that I think I have similar things to him, but in him I see things that I can identify with. He said that sculpture is social, making sculpture public or conceptual.
I went to Douban in 2006, a very early wave, there are several groups that I built, such as Boyce group, no one knew Boyce at that time, 798 group is also built by me. Later, I felt that growing up was like this, the books I had read before, the people who liked them had forgotten, it was impossible to recite some fragments, but they had all become a part of your body.
So I'm interested in Boyce because I have a particular closeness to him, and I'm attracted to him but have no adoration for him. The people I'm interested in are masters, they are higher than mine, and I feel a sense of intimacy with them, I don't know how to explain, they are not secretive in front of me.
Sheng Jie X Digest Sanli Co-film "He UNISON" screenshot
AB: You're doing design clothes now, do you often look for handmade stuff? Including the fabric, as well as the previous manual craftsmanship, looking for a root cause?
DL: Or the root, I don't know if you believe the astrolabe or not. Sheng Jie (new media artist) she herself can look at the astrolabe, I think it is also a kind of talent, there is some logical thinking and interpretation in it. She looked at my astrolabe and was particularly impressed by me, belonging to a character with very strong primitive desires.
So corresponding to my special interest in the roots, I am the original desire seeker. I don't know much about cooking, but if I can get particularly good ingredients, it is especially satisfying to cook without cooking, even if it is very simple to cook or eat raw, and it is the same to look for handmade fabrics.
AB: Do you often go to the mountains to buy cloth?
DL: The place where Sheng Jie helped us shoot this documentary is Dongzhai in Guizhou, where I have been buying cloth. I bought their cloth on Taobao in 2014 and bought it for almost four or five years. I went once in 2018, also to buy cloth, not to "collect wind". I bought cloth from many places, and in 2014 I was doing an exhibition in the Netherlands, going to Hainan Island to see Li Jin, going to Foshan, Guangdong to see Xiangyun Yarn, going to Nantong to see blue printed cloth, and going to about four or five places to see local cloth.
At that time, I also used the fabrics of Tibet and Xinjiang, but I couldn't go, Xinjiang was more chaotic at that time, Tibet was not easy to go, and there was no time, I looked for it from Taobao, from the website of the Hetian township government in Xinjiang, I really found it, it was quite local things, not tourist souvenirs.
I think my discernment is OK, at that time in order to do projects, I bought more than 100 books, all of which are related to ancient Chinese textiles, all kinds of old books, including the "History of Ancient Chinese Textiles" published by China Science Publishing House in the 80s, which was particularly well written. There are also some textile-related materials that have been published in modern times, and I also went to the China Silk Museum in Hangzhou and stayed for two days.
When Dooling went to Tongxiang on a business trip, he stopped by Wuzhen. Tongxiang has the largest sweater processing base in China
AB: Local cloth, do you not need to remodel it when you buy it back?
DL: No, we don't have the right to make a makeover, and all I've picked out is cloth that the locals themselves wear. For example, like daylight drift, it is cleaner than any piece of cloth on the market. Our brands don't go into the mall, and working with commercial brands, I don't use these cloths. The atmosphere in the mall seems to me to be a little dirty, because many industrial fabrics are now overtreated by chemicals.
AB: Where do you think the value of things like art and design in times of social crisis is?
DL: First of all, I can give up some things that interest, especially contemporary art. It has a set of things like playing financial games, which is not actually art, not the root of what I just said, it is some hype.
The fact that contemporary art can start shows that it made a certain contribution to the society at that time. The artists for this product collaboration were chosen by me, when my partner told me that the Mexican gallery had several people she felt she could collaborate with, who had a reputation and whose work had academic value. I chose Damian from it. Ault, I think his work has a sense of everydayness, a sense of social responsibility, and at the same time a critique.
Scarf by Damian Ault in collaboration with Digest Design
Like the pattern on top of our big scarf, from Damian's 1992 comic Book Prisoner. He drew political cartoons before his debut as a contemporary artist. His comic has a very large face, can not see the whole picture, the whole page little by little with the dialogue face is getting smaller and smaller, the last page is in a box, in the lower right corner into a bar code, the hat he wears is a bar code.
We wanted to make a barcode hat to tease it, and there was no time. I only intercepted this as a scarf, and he felt that human beings were limited by the consumerist thing of bar codes. The above conversation is also very interesting, he said what kind of person my father was when I was a child, always buying a bunch of things, and I don't want to grow up to be such a person. Later he grew up and became such a person, and he couldn't help but keep buying things, a total of 12 comics, which I thought was cool.
His most famous work was the dismantling and suspension of a Beetle in 2002. The Beetle was a German car, assembled in Mexico, which he felt was a so-called "globalization of capital", and he made a revolt through his works.
Damian Ault, Cosmic Thing, 2002, stainless steel, wire, 1983 Beetle car and Plexiglass, variable size. Photo courtesy of: Center for Artists and Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
This artist sees himself as a mirror to show you the truth of the world. You yourself can only see a beautiful picture that someone else wants you to see, and he turns the mirror a little and reflects the dark side or the truth to you. It's kind of like a stage, this side is acting, that side is backstage, and he gives you a perspective that allows you to see what's going on backstage.
AB: Modern civilization has great uncertainty, how do people in it deal with uncertainty?
DL: I've read one of the most memorable books about modernity, Modernity and the Holocaust, by Siegmund Bowman. He was actually Polish, went to England, became a British citizen, and he used the Jews during World War II and the German concentration camps as a foothold to write "Modernity and the Holocaust", which is his very famous social commentary, and the perspective is very sharp.
My views may not necessarily be the same as his expressions, but good works will throw out his views and provoke other thoughts from the reader. If you want to be modern, you have to do something like the Holocaust of the German fascists at the time. A bit like when Qin Shi Huang unified all the currencies and weights and measures, isn't that a massacre? The multiculturalism of your existence, or the pluralism of your existence, is all unified.
You would feel that at any stage in history, if you were to talk about progress, there would have to be an act of slaughter, like I spent a month or so at home throwing 30 boxes of stuff, and that's not what a massacre is? You're doing very cold judgment and screening, and you have to do it because then you can move yourself forward and leave more room to put new things in.
Although I do not embrace modernity and modernity, I must be honest with this era, it is impossible to go back to ancient times, it is impossible not to use mobile phones. Progress I am very supportive of, but progress does not represent modernity, because modernity is not exactly a progressive thing, and many are also backwards, which is the pros and cons of modernity.
I don't think it's a modern problem, in ancient times, in the Tang Dynasty, in the Song Dynasty, in the Ming Dynasty, in the Qing Dynasty, maybe people at that time also had such a problem, they were also doing such a visit at that time. It always feels better to go before, but there is no point in discussing these. You have to go forward, and you can't be sorry, the past is the past.
Autonomy of India
Two days ago I just bought an old Gandhi book, Autonomy of India. The book was written by him in 1908, China is still in the Qing Dynasty, and 1919 is the beginning of modern times. There's a sentence in it that I think is wonderful. He said that even British scholars do not recognize modern civilization, they believe that modern civilization is a disease, something that makes human beings more decaying.
He believes that modern civilization is a non-existent thing, because we want to say that we have entered modern times, we must say that we have modern civilization, we must say that there is. Like the short passage I picked two days ago, he said that we rarely see people attacking themselves, and when a person is in a dream, he believes that his dream is real, and he can't feel it is false until he wakes up, which is the same as in the United States now.
Before that, the United States has always considered itself to be the greatest country in the world, and it is precisely the most prosperous place of modern civilization, representing modern civilization and modern system, but many of these "civilizations" are forcibly defined by power.
Before seeing all kinds of discussions and statements about modernity, I feel that it is a non-existent thing in itself, what else is being discussed?
AB: He means that there will be a civilization after that?
DL: I think the civilization that we're experiencing now may be more effective, or more in line with human development. In addition to Boyce, I was particularly fond of another author, the Czech animation director Jan Sven Meyer, who was one of the participants in the surrealist movement, and his creation was stop-motion animation, a bit dark.
The 1993 stop-motion animated short film Food is one of Jan Sweymeyer's masterpieces. In order to show human greed and indifference, the director strengthened the state of "eating"
At that time, I saw that he came up with a live-action movie, still made in a stop-motion animation way, editing people like stop-motion animation, and the story was very much like an ancient Czech fairy tale. Some film critics have said that the world can be divided into two kinds of people, one who has seen his films and one who has not seen his films. He had just finished making that movie called "Man-Eating Tree", which was played by a little girl. A British media interviewed him about "what do you think about black humor", a very normal question, and his answer was, I think black humor has always existed in life, such as the United States in Afghanistan throwing a lot of bombs and throwing food. He felt that this was the stage of modern humanity. Mankind is in the era of consumption civilization, if we must say civilization.
Jan Sven Meyer, Alice, 1998
He was particularly pessimistic, believing that if humanity continued to consume civilization, it would be the last stage of human civilization. From this sentence, you can also feel that there is a certain height of real thought, or that people who have seen this era clearly do not approve of this era, or that they see the era in which we live as a "transitional period". Because in fact, it is not long, from the Industrial Revolution, it is more than two hundred years, similar to the founding of the United States. If the United States is over, maybe this civilization is over, it is an intermediate transition, it is not called civilization.
Art Business Editorial Department
Interview, Text: Liu Xianglin
Edit: Van Lin
Image credit: Dooling, Network