Zhao Bandi in his "little nest". Courtesy of the organizer
Noah's Ark is coming to shore.
Since November 15 last year, "Noah's Ark in the Post-epidemic Era - Zhao Bandi's Little Nest" has been floating in the small space on the side of the permanent exhibition hall of Boyce on the second floor of Shanghai Hao Art Museum for four months, and thousands of viewers have come here to find their own way to comfort their hearts through chat.
In this era of crowds, the meaning of chat has far exceeded a kind of acquaintance's personal contact and sharing, the traditional chat is "nagging", "swinging dragon gate array", or "Gasanhu" in Wu language, which has no boundary with outsiders. However, all this to this day, when the network paves the underlying optical cable of the opinion market, then every chat begins to gradually come to the foreground, and between reality and performance, an almost obsessive attachment to human design has grown.
The "I Believe in Reading" reading meeting was held at "Zhao Bandi's Little Nest". Courtesy of the organizer
This is destined to be an era of loud noise, and noise is undoubtedly a kind of performance, so the group chat APPClubhouse came into being, and his guests stood like the walls of the ancient Greek city-state, listened to by the people surrounding him, and his fans could also stand where he stood by raising their hands. The rules set by the contemporary Internet for live chat make people keen to "take the wheat" in full view of the public, but people should ask themselves, is there a market for free speech without being spied on? If in a realistic room, the chat returns to its essence, does it still have charm?
"Zhao Bandi's little nest" suddenly has a kind of interoperability with Clubhouse today, and some people call it "offline version of Clubhouse", believing that this is the "dividend and surprise" that the artist never expected. When the epidemic tore the entire year of 2020 to pieces, Zhao Bandi's first thought was to have a work to respond to this catastrophe in human history. As a leading figure in Chinese contemporary art, he consciously has the responsibility and obligation to find an outlet for people in the name of art, which is also the origin of "Zhao Bandi's Little Nest".
Foreign friends visited "Zhao Bandi's Little Nest" to talk about the epidemic experience. Courtesy of the organizer
"But history is originally made up of disaster after disaster, has human beings ever been better? I was inherently pessimistic. Zhao Bandi said that this set the tone for his performance in the disaster, which can be sung in a low voice, but not a tragic narrative tone. When the curator Du Xiyun found him, he was isolated in a three-star hotel in Pudong, when he was depressed because he always ate oranges for lunch, and asked the front desk to negotiate, "Just give me a fruit that doesn't make it", the front desk said, they also know, but this standard can only be eaten like this.
Zhao Bandi felt powerless, the absurdity of reality was torn open, he promised Du Xiyun to create a work, but what he wanted to create was a test. He has no intention of exaggerating the particularity of the epidemic, arguing that if an artist is to be reshaped by a plague, it can only show childishness. So, let's have an open field. Du Xiyun imagined all kinds of heights it could reach for the "little nest", the confession room, the swaddling room, the shelter, the consultation room... Zhao Bandi is reluctant to use these words, the world of art is infinitely open to the general public, he still follows the refusal to explain at the Panda Exhibition, using a very gentle and inclusive emotional medium, if there is no way to draw a soft bed that undertakes to hold all the pain, this concept precedes, but advocates the infinite extension of the concept of the work, is the lower the sense of existence, the better.
On December 9 last year, a WeChat book club where I was located held an offline book club in the "small nest", and one of us, who did not say much, always left casually and politely, and left silently before the final dinner. Unexpectedly, Zhao Bandi received the lady's WeChat the next day and solemnly told him that he wanted to talk alone.
Zhao Bandi chatted with a lady. Courtesy of the organizer
The lady's son once brought her to the Hao Art Museum, where he studied design. But she continued, "He's gone... To this day, I don't understand, why did my son choose to leave this world? He didn't leave me a word. ”
So, on one afternoon, Zhao Bandi and this lady sat together in a small nest, a shack made of moso bamboo and a lawn paved with bamboo leaves, emitting the fragrance of bamboo. In front of his painting, called "Private", the lady said, "In the work you have built, I call it a 'field', and I have the idea of releasing my mind." ”
The oil painting in the nest is Zhao Bandi's "Private" specially created during the epidemic. Courtesy of the organizer
You don't know why a design student who combines thousands of pampered things will not quit. During the two-and-a-half-hour chat, Zhao Handi said that he himself was in tears, feeling the entanglement of a dark force and a transcendental light of hope. The extended meaning of the nest is constantly happening, it is the "Noah's Ark" in the epidemic, when people collide in it, the more it bursts out of the topic of ambiguity, and even the original problem of life.
Zhao Bandi is not a person who loves to define, and in his chat with him, his words rarely touch on the essence of things. But he said that every time he flew from Beijing to Shanghai for a small nest party, he would also make him nervous, "That's my job." This nest has no critical smoke, nor can it see a strongly figurative expression of social reality, if this 1:1 simulated medical mask hammock has any meaning, then many celebrities have come to sit, and when they see it, they will say, "This year has indeed been spent like this."
30+ women made a guest appearance at "Zhao Bandi's Little Nest" to debate women's topics face-to-face. Courtesy of the organizer
When the "Panda Era" ended, Zhao Bandi entered the "party period", from the initial ironic and deconstructive experiments on serious symbols to today's small nests, his artistic expression has become more inclined to gentle and peaceful social intervention, and more and more consciously or unconsciously towards what the German postmodern artist Joseph Beuys called "social sculpture".
"Social sculpture" is a generalized concept of performance art, which advocates that everyone can participate in the occurrence of art, and further advanced on Duchamp's "anti-art" theory. If Duchamp desperately presented a ready-made urinal to the New York Independent Artists Exhibition, titled "Spring", just for a sense of ridicule and rebellion, then Boyce had no interest in attacking or innovating in the field of the art world, and he directly let art out of the vein of art.
Zhao Bandi's "party" began with "China Lake C" six years ago, when he put a social party with a strong sense of Chinese class into the lake, letting the models stagger in the knee-high water of the lake. In addition to this 4m by 3m oil painting, he still follows the "happening" in the real field, and carries out a reception salon in front of the painting, so that the still painting on the wall and the "here- and then" in front of the painting are intertextual. For the observer, the omnipresent concept of the work inside and outside the work can not be clearer, and the layer by layer, not consciously confirmed, is even more inspiring for the coldness of reality.
On December 31, 2020, friends from all over the world came to celebrate the New Year at the "Zhao Bandi's Little Nest". Courtesy of the organizer
But in public, Mr. Zhao rarely describes himself as a critic, claiming to be picking up fragmented truths. What can be seen is that the actions or devices he put into practice no longer have traces of controversy and provocation, but are lighter and lighter like water, soft and rigid, and can be rounded. For example, in the recent "nest", there are those who laugh and scold, those who look for comfort, those who bring guitar violins for entertainment, or just a meeting place... Zhao Bandi is like a field observer, using his eyes and ears, as well as the camera of the art museum, to record the different reactions of people to the same proposition over the past year.
A special additional effect of the epidemic is that the Internet has never been able to eat into the boundaries of reality, and it has begun to legitimately replace the will of human beings as living individuals, and perhaps today, everyone is destined to passively tie a chain into the cyberspace. Zhao Bandi's nest, even if unintentional, is also one of the corners of the offline opinion field in the Internet age, and if you occasionally withdraw in a different dimension and come to such a space, it almost gives a Havel-style "living in reality" feeling. It returns to the essence of chat, so that art no longer lives alone in the deep palace of yangchun and snow, and most importantly, everyone can access some kind of flowing function and become part of art.
Author Wang Danyang Beijing News Editor Xu Meilin
Proofreading Li Lijun
Source: Beijing News