the confessional, the wandering, the lichtung
“皮肤地形（Terrain of the Skin）”围绕六位艺术家蔡宝贤（Bo Choy），曹舒怡（Cao Shuyi），黎雨诗（Li Yushi），裴彦清（Pei Yanqing），任佳琳（Ren Jialin），陶伊（Yi To）的近期实践，聚焦她们对生物肉身及其情境的干预和介入，以不同维度的多重虚构批判性地将其与现实分离和解构，呈现出关于个体自身及所处领地（territory）的新的自然意识和文化构想。在展览语境中，皮肤成为微观的分子集合/生物表皮/社会身份外衣/地理表征，地形成为其宏观投射和意识形态，这些交叉的隐喻也是破坏既有边界进行的神秘勾连、回溯与展望另一种时空历史和亲缘想象。
唐娜·哈拉维（Donna Haraway）在后现代身体的生态政治中提示了微观生物模型与地理政治模型之间的相似度，免疫系统对内部/外部的识别和分隔，巧妙对应了机体的保护防御机制并联系于国家/国界。以生物微观层面的有机活动所投射出的是物种对其栖息地的归属、占有、控制，如何重塑自然和摆脱这种关于科学理性的线性发展的人造意识形态是女性主义视角试图松动、摇晃的，从而建立消解边界之后的可绵延的亲密和包容。在交织于漫长集体历史和碎片个人记忆的复杂结构之外，艺术家们离开被生成的社会场域和被书写的生物经验而进行节外生枝的吊诡想象成为一个虚构的锚，靠近的是未被驯服的、动态流动的时空。展览中，蔡宝贤重新编写民间非官方叙事和神秘主义，曹舒怡再创造了多元流动的生物身体集合，黎雨诗破除了社会性的性别角色和欲望主体，裴彦清于事物之间建立新的生命秩序，任佳琳以独特视角看待和理解自然，陶伊将身体作为容器感知世界本质和规律。这关于如何从微妙的无数个“我”出发，绸缪一次撬动宏观认知和叙事的“我们”的落后的、危险的飞行。
Hive Center for Contemporary Art is thrilled to announce the presentation of curator Tang Yifei’s latest project, Terrain of the Skin, from 4 March to 16 April, 2023, in Hall B and C. This group exhibition features the recent practice of six artists, Bo Choy, Cao Shuyi, Li Yushi, Pei Yanqing, Ren Jialin and Yi To, focusing on their involvement and intervention with biological bodies and their contexts, critically separating and deconstructing them from reality in a multitude of fiction from different perspectives, revealing a new consciousness of nature and cultural conceptions of the individual and their territory. In the context of this exhibition, “skin” becomes a microscopic collection of molecules/biological skin/social identity façades/geographical appearances, while “terrain” serves as its macroscopic mapping and ideology; these intersecting metaphors are also enigmatic connections that undermine established boundaries, retrospecting and projecting alternative spatio-temporal histories and kinship imaginations.
Donna Haraway suggests a similarity between micro-biological and geopolitical models in the biopolitics of the postmodern body, where the discourse of the recognition and segregation between the internal/external by the immune system subtly corresponds to the organism’s protective defence mechanisms and is associated with national/state borders. With the organic activity of the microbiological level projecting the belonging, possession, and control of the species over its habitat, how to reshape nature and escape this artificial ideology of linear development from scientific rationality is an attempt by the feminist perspective to unsettle, to oscillate, and thus to establish an intimacy and inclusion that could dissolve the boundaries and sustain. Beyond the intricate structures intertwined with long collective histories and fragmented personal memories, the artists’ uncanny imagination, which departs from the generated social field and the written biological experience to engage in extraneous complications, becomes a fictional anchor, approaching the untamed, dynamic flow of space-time. In this exhibition, Bo Choy restuctures unofficial folk narratives and mysticism; Can Shuyi reinvents a pluralistic, dynamic collection of biological bodies; Li Yushi deconstructs social gender roles and subjects of sex desire; Pei Yanqing establishes a new order of life between objects; Ren Jialin observes and interprets nature from a unique perspective; Yi To perceives the body as a vessel for the essence and laws of the world. It is about how, from the subtle myriad of ‘I’s’, a retrogressive and dangerous flight is contemplated to evoke the ‘we’ of a larger cognition and narrative.