旅行者1号是NASA在20世纪70年代发射的敞开太阳系的太空探测器，作为携带人类文明片段的飞船，第一次闯入其他世界。在64亿公里外旅行者1号捕捉的摄影中，人类得以从如此遥远的距离观看地球，地球竟成为一个只有0.12像素的微小光斑。这似乎成为了我们所处世界的唯一性和脆弱性的佐证，同时也楔引着微观与宏观之间的玄妙迁移。如果说当时的旅行者1号携带着离开某种特定主体叙述的愿望，那么“旅行者1号（Voyager I）”则是寄予以个人或是日常的小单位形成的自治群落漂移在稳固的共同想象陷阱之外，希望触及破解大框架的可能性，尝试去推演一种更复杂的局面。
蜂巢当代艺术中心荣幸地宣布，“旅行者1号（Voyager I）”将于2023年12月22日至2024年1月27日在蜂巢·生成｜上海空间呈现，作为第一次将蜂巢·生成作为项目空间，期盼如同旅行者1号飞船敞开太阳系一般将惯性运转的系统不再闭环，进行更动态的生产。此项目以艺术家谭英杰在长征独立空间的表演剧场《不要让事物来到你眼前》（Tan Yingjie: Don’t Let Things Come to You）中的六件舞台装置作为展示空间，由策展人唐一菲邀请六位艺术家庄萃玮（Kara Chin）、郝铄（Hao Sure）、许晶媛（Jungwon Jay Hur）、重田将光（Masamitsu Shigeta）、谭英杰（Tan Yingjie）、向惠迪（Huidi Xiang）成为六个盒子的宿主，在各自2-3平方米的领域分享一些个人和世界互动中产生的奇遇，现场将呈现包括绘画、雕塑、装置、影像、写作和声音等作品。
以下是寄生在六个盒子中的艺术家们的人物小传。
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庄萃玮迷恋陷阱，无论是视觉陷阱、技术陷阱或是制度陷阱。她的电脑里充满不同尺度的各种模型和机械组件，经常观看不同种类和功能的机器人工作视频和机械产品以及关于科幻的或鬼魅的电影。其实这些都是关于“并置”的冲突，观看的现实和现实的距离，有机和合成的距离——即技术如何加剧困扰或者推动未来。庄萃玮的盒子使用了电影布景的逻辑和视觉，在这之中搭建了一个微缩电影院，迷你屏幕后是翻滚而来的爆米花洪水，仿佛末日。动画中匀速运转的虚拟雕塑——净化电磁场的装置，仿佛技术的宗教文物，演绎着虚假的和平和信仰。
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郝铄常常感觉自己在修行，从家到工作室路上不断出现的小猫们，鸽子群站在工作室阳台看她画画——这些都是这趟修行中可以称之为神迹的时刻。更多时候会接近僧侣念经的状态，在没有其他装饰物和柔软的沙发椅子的工作室长时间地画画，创作时身处顶层9楼的身体仿佛带着意识也逐渐升高，就像在飞。这种甜蜜与痛苦的纠缠形态也穿梭于她对世界的观察和阅读中，写作与绘画、文艺复兴雕塑和玉石造像、宗教与神话都在她的创作中以不同生物的身体携带其象征不断互溶和蜕变。正如郝铄的盒子外那只隐蔽的耳朵，她将外部世界的叙事过滤重新编织排演为自己的故事——盒子内即是她的角落写字台。
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许晶媛有很多和自己相处的仪式。从早晨起床开始，小神龛的一炷香伴随着新的一天的个人宣言——关于作品、世界和任何事情。在工作室创作前，她会阅读一本书的某一章节，挑选一张音乐专辑听；傍晚离开工作室前会坐在扶手椅上仿佛成为自己画作的法官，进行审判或忏悔。这些有形和无形的“语言”是许晶媛的兴趣所在，通过绘画、版画、陶艺或木工将他们由不确定的形态建立确定性的过程——汲取艺术史绘画、韩国和西方民间音乐、20世纪欧洲电影等视觉材料创造一种自传和虚构交错的非物质文化遗产的重新诠释。她的盒子像是一所基站或是一处碑，遮盖的版画织物、白桦木上沿着木纹的景观/肖像绘画、寓言碎片的陶瓷重新启动文化历史的齿轮。
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重田将光交叉理解和练习他的绘画和音乐，到工作室的第一步是先演奏古典吉他唤醒手指再开始绘画。像野外录音机收集外面世界的声音一样，重田捕捉城市景观中出现的不同波段，他们的不同形状、尺度、色调投射了城市的速度、节奏和韵律。画累了重田就开始为他的画作制作画框——塑造画布形状或框架装置，这些装置通常由在城市周围找到的材料或在其工作室的废弃材料组成。这也成为他创作的视觉环境与声音和地点的关系的纪录。于是他的盒子表层不同曲线的组合也呼应与声音波段和频率的走线，上方的小盒子里所藏的是来自他曾经的乐队WalkingBunny的同名曲目《Masamitsu》——荒诞的“交响乐”。
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谭英杰每天都要玩一款古老的游戏《三国志》，以早上七点被群友催促做任务替代闹铃。然后就会去拥有巨大顶高的平房和仓库的工作室工作，进入欢乐的废墟——改造的遗弃电影道具和家具，板材铁丝等各种材料，装满柜子的发条玩具，无数图像切片……穿插于这些散落的物件之间，有正在研究的作品模型，也有已成型的装置、雕塑。如同他工作室的状态，谭英杰的实践也是物件携带其本身的空间互相入侵的结果，批判地视觉化了对现代生活遭遇的感知。盒子中的大小剧场——小屏幕影像中由日常事件引申的对个体处境的思考，移动剧场装置对世界是个草台班子的隐喻都是看了可能反而会长舒一口气的群体性自嘲。
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向惠迪不觉得自己完全生活在现实世界，她的创作像每天走在一条流水线上，但这条流水线不是工业重复单一的，而是像跑跑卡丁车的车道一般灵活崎岖的。她的作品模仿和改造现成品——即商品/产品/装饰物等，事物被制造的逻辑是相似的，但向惠迪重新将他们的外观、功能、零件错位组装和兼容，他们成为替代性的偏离消费逻辑和功能主义的更丰富情绪的承载物。工作室里的物件都是惠迪逐渐组装的，有自己的3d打印机做实验，很多小练习都在被长久的观察等待入列的时刻。对应于她的盒子也有诸多不同通道，小门外和室内不再成双成对出现的马里奥鞋子，杯脚堆叠形成的古典柱子等都是她以开玩笑的方式触发的可能不同于固化意识形态的另类思考。
Voyager 1, NASA’s space probe that launched in the 1970s in exploration of the Solar System, made its first foray into a different world as a spacecraft carrying fragments of human civilisation. In photographs captured by Voyager 1 from 6.4 billion kilometres away, humans managed to observe the Earth from a distance so far away that it became a tiny speck of light with only 0.12 pixels. This seems to justify the uniqueness and fragility of the world we inhabit and navigates a subtle displacement between the microscopic and the macroscopic. If, at the time, Voyager 1 carried with it the desire to depart from the narrative of a particular subject, the project “Voyager I” envisages an autonomous community of individuals or small, everyday units adrift outside the solid confines of the common imagination, in the hope of reaching out to the possibility of deciphering the broader established social framework and attempting to extrapolate a more complex complicity.
“Voyager I” is on view from 22 December 2023 to 27 January 2024 at Hive Becoming in Shanghai. Using Hive Becoming as project space for the first time, the project envisions a more dynamic approach to production in the same way that the Voyager 1 spacecraft explored the Solar System by releasing the inertia of the system from its closed loop. This project takes six performance installations from artist Tan Yingjie's directorial theatre, Don't Let Things Come to You, performed at Long March Independent Space, as the exhibition spaces, where curator Tang Yifei invites six artists, Kara Chin, Hao Sure, Jungwon Jay Hur, Masamitsu Shigeta, Tan Yingjie and Huidi Xiang to participate and become the hosts of the six boxes, sharing some of their personal encounters with the world in their respective 2-3 square metres of space, showing artworks that include paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, writings, and sound pieces.
Below are character biographies of the artists residing in the six boxes.
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Kara Chin is fascinated by traps, whether visual, technological, or institutional. Her computer is filled with various models and robotic parts of different scales, and she regularly watches videos of robots at work and different kinds of mechanical products, as well as Sci-Fi or films about ghosts. In fact, these are all about the conflict of ‘juxtapositions’, the distance between the reality of viewing and the reality of seeing, the distance between the organic and the synthetic, i.e., how technology can exacerbate the disturbances or propel the future. Chin’s box plays with the logic and vision of a film set, inside which a miniature cinema is constructed, with a tumbling flood of popcorn behind a miniature screen, seeming like doomsday. The virtual sculpture that runs at an even pace in the animation - a device that purifies the electromagnetic field - appears as the religious relics of technology, enacting on false peace and faith.
2
Hao Sure often feels as though she is in spiritual practice; the kittens that keep appearing on the way from her home to her studio, the flock of pigeons that stand on the balcony of her studio and watch as she paints - these are the moments that can be described as miraculous in this spiritual journey. More often than not, she would come close to the state of a chanting monk, painting in her studio for a long time without any other decorations or soft chaises, her body, being on the ninth floor, the top floor, gradually ascending with her consciousness during the creative process as if she was flying. This entailed form of sweetness and pain is also embedded in her observation and reading of the world, where writing and painting, Renaissance sculpture and jade statues, religion and mythology are constantly dissolving and metamorphosing in her practice with the bodies of different creatures bearing their emblems. Just like the hidden ear outside Hao’s box, she filters and rearranges the narrative of the external world into her own - inside the box is her writing desk in the corner.
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Jungwon Jay Hur has many rituals to live with herself. From the moment she wakes up in the morning, a burning stick of incense in a small shrine accompanies a personal pronouncement for the new day - about the work, the world, and indeed anything. Before starting to work in the studio, she reads a chapter of a book or picks out an album to listen to; before leaving the studio in the evening, she sits in an armchair in judgment or confession as if she were the judge of her own work. These tangible and intangible ‘languages’ are an interest to Hur, establishing their certainty from indeterminate forms through painting, printmaking, ceramics, and woodwork, drawing on visual references such as art historical paintings, Korean and Western folk music, and 20th-century European films to create a reinterpretation of intangible cultural heritage that intertwines autobiography and fiction. Her box becomes a station or a monument, where covered printed fabrics, landscape and portrait paintings on birchwood along the grain, and ceramics of allegorical elements reactivate the gears of cultural history.
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Masamitsu Shigeta cross-understands and practices his painting and music, arriving at his studio to play classical guitar to awaken his fingers before starting to paint. Like a field recorder collecting the sounds of the outside world, Shigeta captures the different frequencies that appear in the cityscape, their different shapes, scales, and tones projecting the city’s speed, rhythm, and tempo. Once tired of painting, Shigeta began to create frames for his work, moulding the shape of the canvas or framed installations, which are often made up of materials found around the city or discarded in his studio. This also became a recording of the visual environment he created in relation to sound and place. The combination of different curves on the surface of the box echoes the alignment of sound bands and frequencies, and the small box on the top houses Masamitsu, an absurd ‘symphony’ from the eponymous track by his former band, Walking Bunny.
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Tan Yingjie plays an old game called ‘Three Kingdoms’ every day, replacing his alarm with being urged on quests by his group chat friends at seven in the morning. He would, then, go to work in the studios with high-ceiling single-storey houses and storage, enter the joyful ruins - converted abandoned film props and furniture, metal sheets and wires, other assorted materials, cabinets full of wind-up toys, countless graphic fragments, etc. Among these scattered objects are models of works in progress, as well as already-assembled installations and sculptures. Like the state of his studio, Tan Yingjie’s practice emerges as a result of objects invading each other bearing their own space, critically visualising perceptions of contemporary experiences. The big and the small theatres in his box- a contemplation of the individual’s situation derived from everyday occurrences in the small-screen video, and the mobile theatre installation’s metaphor of the world as a troupe on an improvised stage - are both collective self-ridicule that might rather be a long sigh of relief upon inspection.
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Huidi Xiang doesn’t consider herself to be living entirely in the real world. Her practice feels like an everyday walk on an assembly line, which is not industrially repetitive and plain but rather flexible and rugged like the go-kart tracks. Her work imitates and transforms readymade objects, i.e. commodities, commercial products, and decorations. The logic by which these things are fabricated is similar, but by her misplacing, reassembling, and complementing their appearance, functionality, and parts, they become alternative deviations from the logic of consumption and functionalism as vessels carrying richer emotions. The objects in Xiang’s studio are gradually assembled by the artist with a 3D printer for experimentation, where many small exercises are under lengthy observation, waiting for the moment of inclusion. Correspondingly, her box also has many different passages: the Mario shoes that no longer appear in pairs outside the petit entrance and inside the space, the classical columns formed by the stacking of glasses, etc., are all her joking triggers of alternative reflections that may differ from the established ideology.