Site- Specific Installation for 1 person at the time, solo show at Studio 943 Kunming, Yunnan China
daily 12 noon – 7pm
I filled the space of the studio/gallery with red Yunnan soil, I left viewers inside – one at the time- exploring it barefoot, sitting on a stool borrowed from a buddhist temple nearby. I washed the viewer’s feet at the end of the experience, in order to let him/her exit as clean as they entered.
This site-specific installation in the space of the studio will give people, inhabitants and artists, the chance to reconnect with a perception of time and space that is not related to the capitalistic pressure of producing and consuming things, so intense in China right now.
I would like to transform the space in a ‘free-time sanctuary’ for few days, where people can come and just stay. There is no ticket to pay, no obligation to follow. There will be only red soil to walk barefoot into, in the beautiful light generated by the transparent strips of the studio’s ceiling.
The red soil comes from Yunnan, a specific area that has been taken by local artists in the past twenty years as a powerful symbol of the return their cultural roots and to nature, against the fast growing economy system represented by the new city skyline.
The aim of the project is to “free” the land used today as another mean of production, left dying in the corners of constructions sites all over the city, and to give it back to people, as an inspirational and powerful reminder of Yunnan’s cultural identity and truth, against the ordinary phenomenon of faking places, things and objects so common nowadays in China and especially here, in Kunming.”
Credits:
Armin Hoefs, Wang Han