Portfolio of Dali Wu and Qiao Wan

Portfolio of Dali Wu

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“Being and Time” ©Dali Wu Multimedia Installation. 2010 Material: Expired chocolates, honey, butter, fruits, syrups.

Wax, 93 x 90 x 171 cm the tower, looping video/sound.

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The whole genera,ve procedure of tower

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Detail of sculpture 4/35

Video link: The looping video/sound art which is projected on the floor: “être et temps”, 33’33”, 2010.

I did this metaphysical experiment that leG me with a lot of learning. About life. About being.

About becoming. About ,me. About the very existence. Join me, as I narrate this. At my home in Limoges at France, this tower was born. It was created out of expired chocolates, honey and buMer, fruits and sweet syrups, and of course out of love and interest. Unlike a newly born kid, this tower is as tall as I am. As a pilgrimage, I took this tower in a van to a forest, and I installed this tower in the forest. Then I let it stay there for three months of ,me. Everyday I visit the tower, and take a picture of it. To archive the metamorphosis. To capture the being, going through the becoming. Becoming something. Alongside I record the environmental sounds in the forest. Then I did garnish the soundtrack with the ,cking of the clock. To indicate ,me, which, otherwise, is phenomenally absent, at-least in a deep forest, when all that is there, is being. The Existence. I interleaved the audio with the video, while I leG the tower in the forest for about three months. In the meanwhile, ,me collabora,ng with nature, has turned this tower into a large refugee shelter for beau,ful ants, snails and at-least ten varie,es of insects and various other species. Later I move this tower into the city for display, in a place surrounded by glass walls on all the four sides. A phenomenological aquarium, as I call it. Along with the presence of ants, snails and every other life form that traveled all the way from the forest, the tower along with it's unified environment cons,tutes a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art s,mula,ng all the senses.The putrid odor exhaled from this tower composed of scented syrups, roMen fruits and chocolates, s,fles this aquarium, evoking the five senses will subtly hint at the decay or the death.

I use this work to emphasize the no,ons of desire, sublima,on and their limi,ng case. Freud oGen speaks about the phallus and the penis envy. I have had my share of such envy, akin to every girl, as he presupposes. But for me it's connected to the societal structure as a whole. I 5/35

bathed in the shower of stereotypes that everyone can't help but bath in and the psychic reality of phallus con,nues to live in me. The tower here represents "phallus". Now let's digress and understand how sublima,on, desire and the art are embodied and grounded in each other. Building on the work of Freud, very famous french philosopher Jaques Lacan, looked at the penis envy (Penisneid) under a linguis,c sense. This resonates more with the aforemen,oned explana,on. For Lacan, penis envy doesn't literally represent the envy for the penis qua biological organ but to a generalized en,ty "phallus" (He always preferred to use Phallus in place of penis). This linguis,c turn, enables Lacan to emphasize on the differences, phallus qua not-a-mother en,ty. Kids understand the rela,onship not between father and mother but between penis qua Phallus and Mother qua not-a-phallus-possessingen,ty. This hierarchy is encountered as soon as the child is pivoted in learning the symbolic order -- "the world of father". The ontology of objects for Freud on one hand is grounded in the domain of sa,sfac,on-frustra,on. Objects that exist exterior to us (das Objekt drausen) are not necessarily present in our representa,on (eines vorgestellten Dinges) of them. Freud believes that our reality finding is all about re-finding the objects as objects seize to exist, the moment they give away the real sa,sfac,on. It is precisely by nega,ng the Das Ding or La chose or The Thing, that our experience accounts for the humdrum encounters with the objects.

This differen,a,on happens alongside interleaved with the spa,o-temporal differen,a,on in a (hier/heter)archial fashion. It starts off with the first companion or the fellow object, the mother (Nebenmensch). Then it sets ahead a whole stream of psycho-perceptual changes leading to the percep,on and understanding of society, life and thereby all our intellectual endeavors. Lacan picks up this thread in connec,on with "the Thing" (primordial) that he explains in the context of the mother, pleasure principle and the ethics. Freud believes that there's no sovereign good, and sovereign good, the mother, is an object of incest and therefore forbidden. But the pleasure principle makes an overhead approach to das Ding.

Insofar as man, in order to follow the path of his pleasure, must literally circle around it, maintaining a healthy distance from it, to avoid incest. It is this mutual craving and repulsion that keeps us from and fixates us on the first object of our desire, the Other (Mother) that is also, as Lacan puts it, our "excluded interior". This is the beginnings of the "void" from the excluded interior that Lacan chanced upon. Naked example of das Ding is in the clay pot, one of the earliest markers of the presence of human beings in an area. PoMer as Lacan says, has fashioned the pot thereby to embrace and make present a void, at the center, of the real which is called the thing". Pain,ngs on walls of the room is another example, where in such an arrangement void is evident in the center when you take into account the space, illusory and debatable its status may be from a metaphysical or scien,fic viewpoint. This void is the devoid of desire, which we try to find and re-find again and again, over and over, but which, ironically, never existed in the beginning-or rather, existed as this void in the other (Nebenmensch) and in ourselves. It's this void that ins,gates the desire, void as das Ding and the problem of sublima,on is situated in this disconnect of never imagining it. Lacan, addresses this void, various ,mes as hole, the vagina (Intui,ng from roman,c novels) etc., and that will result in a lot of gender and sexuality based reflec,ons. Reflec,ng upon the earlier passages make me delve into a personal example. My rela,onship with my mother 6/35

has always been complex. Despite of the presence of my father, my mother always played the role of father in my life, thereby making the "mother" really inaccessible. This is a perfect example of the void, and thereby the La Chose thereby the sublima,on, that transformed my personality and my art work.

Lacan points at three ways of marking the sublima,on in the context of the void — religion, science, and art — each in its own way circle around the void. Religion (Though I feel, Buddhism and some Hindu religions that embrace "Shunyata" as counterexamples to this) tries to evade the void by displacing the man away from it. Science peculiarly avoids this void altogether by considering reality as given and this makes the concept of the void or empty center obsolete. Abolishing desire and thereby this void, science erects the so called objec,vity elimina,ng the subject at-least to certain extent. Art represses the das Ding via representa,on that serves to disguise its presence and, in disguising, reveal its cosmological plethora of ar,s,c aMributes: Colors, shapes, strokes, emo,ons etc., But the void is ever present, just in a different form. WiMgenstein, for instance, was a classic philosopher, who despite of changing his views all through his life, dealt with the way of dealing with sublima,on and void, that resulted from his upbringing and his homosexual character. In fact the greatest intellectual outbursts he have had in his life that made him famous were due to the dynamics governing void and sublima,on. He craved for the purity of logical form qua das Ding.

For some the void is death. All the foods I have used in the artwork are metaphorical and hint at a deeper emo,on. Chocolates for carnal desires. I indicate the sublima,on via the decay of the things we have craved for. The chocolates, the honey, and so on. Chocolates that are desired, eatable and solemn and sacred, at this stage are roMen and their presence is unbearable, hints at the Oedipus complex (Incest and the object of desire clearly). All of this boils down the very no,on of being and nothing. Being and Time. A fusion of Heidegger and Sartre. My work is not based on their work, but derives their philosophy as a conclusion.

Time, Being, Becoming, Nothing. We have our fair share of understanding on these topics.

This work embodies all of them in one framework. The tower was alive, with the carnal desires qua chocolates, but with passage of ,me, resulted in a (incestual forbidden) unapproachable void with its roMen smells and appearance. Sublima,on is the desire to s,ll crave for the object, that elevates this object to the dignity of das Ding, the phallus, and surprising learning of this work is the elucida,on of the following paradox. Here object of craving, the tower with the carnal desires, that's roMen don't form a void, but a phallus, and the void is hinted at a higher level. The nothingness, the impermanence, the ,melessness.

They may be used differently in language but they do form a unified whole. The Gestalt. It is the ,melessness that lets us see the impermanence and thereby the nothingness. The decay of the tower though symbolic of the death is, but, a new beginning of life. With all the ants and life forms on it. It didn't decompose and vanish but con,nues to exist through these life forms. In the tango of being and ,me, the inseparable duo, it is not that being is situated in ,me or ,me is a result of being, but the reality is an indecipherable amalgama,on of being and ,me. The carnal desires qua chocolate, the expira,on qua ,me. It's not a baMle between Being and Time. It's a roman,c tango. Being in Time. Time in Being. Roman,c Tango...

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“Wrathful deities conter entropy” ©Dali Wu Installation. 2015 Material: Digital painting, light spot, transparent film 150 x 150 cm

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We live in an digital era. We always thought maMer produced informa,on, but soon with the advancement of scien,fic formalisms we realised, that everything fundamentally is made up of informa,on, as physicist John Wheeler once said, “It from Bit”.

So “Glitch” (short-lived failure in a system), is no longer a stranger to us. This term is actually itself contradictory, because the “failure” in the material world means lack of some elements, but the glitch itself in the digital world, implies excess — that means too much interference. As Rudolf Arnheim says, “Informa,on is the opposi,on of entropy, and entropy is the measure of disorder. ” Through this series of art work I try to portray the complex paradoxical nature concerning the world of digi,za,on. The core laws of physics, as ever, are like the eternal commandments, that can’t be easily violated. One of the laws of thermodynamics concerns with a thing called, entropy. Simply put, disorder. It says disorder in the universe always tends to increase. Which is why you never see a broken glass assemble itself into a perfect

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one. While this has a lot of implica,ons to many fields with in physics and to the nature of ,me, it has also has some implica,ons in the domain of metaphysics. And in art.

We tend to forget that the beau,ful order we see around us, created an otherwise unno,ceable disorder along with it, that we generally tend to ignore. Such is life! But art gives me window to express this. In this art work I show how that the light that passes through these transparent film reveal to us the underlying pain,ng. The areas that allow the light to pass by form a border around the areas in which don’t allow the light to pass by, crea,ng the image as we see. Such is the situa,on with our everyday reality. The order we create automa,cally produces the disorder and the light of the intellect should let us see it as a whole!

While the wrathful dei,es in us try to baMle the entropy, to obtain order in chaos, there’s no baMle universally. Order and disorder are like the two sides of the door that open into the reality. Welcome, home!

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“Uterus Pensant” (Uterus thinks) ©Dali Wu Installation multimedia. 2016 Material: 8 digital engravings printed on adhesive tapes glued face to face 150 x 150 cm, with sculptures made by 3D printer stuck on each print. Brown sugar, butter, syrup. 5 lighting spots, 1 video projector, 1 speaker, a large white fabric 12/35

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Under the name of Eros and Thanatos, lust and pain are united.

The concept of "being-towards-death" is a thread of clear light, an arrow and an illumination, which shows the destination where we are going and of what is to come.

“Uterus Pensant”(Uterus Thinks) is a multimedia installation composed of 8 digital engravings printed on adhesive tape, suspended one after the other. The viewer follows this chain of engravings, walking on the white cloth on the ground, which is also a projection screen, comes in front of a projection of a looping video titled "Being Towards Death ".

Video link: “Being Towards Death”

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Selection of series “Nightmare”, drawing mix media. 28 x 36 cm of each.

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Humans Have no Free Will II ©Dali Wu Installation multimedia.

2013 1 Illuminated manuscript 41 x 31cm (Gutenberg Bible format), 1 handmade book in Luther Bible format, with 1 repetitive sentence “human have no free will” in mostly every page, except 2 blank pages

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I pay homage to the quote from Max Weber “Specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.”through this work.

As I sit back enjoying a sip my morning coffee, I see a group of ants on my window wandering around for hours. “Without a pause, Without a purpose?”, I think. What does these ants hunt for? Why do they go round and round in circles? Do they long for the essence, the purpose? I keep thinking..

“Thank god, at-least my life is not purposeless and meaningless”, so I thought while I sit back and relax. The aroused philosophical reflexes in my mind say otherwise. What if we, akin to ants, roam around thinking that we have a purpose and meaning, whereas in reality we are chained and prisoned by the fundamental parameters and purposeless laws of the cosmos that control, constrict and construct the reality around us? What’s my role in this grandiose universe?

What about my will? Well, when I shift the gears in my car and accelerate, I know it’s “ME” who has done so, at my will. So is the situation, when I reach out for a tissue to wipe my face. It’s always me who abides to the legalities of the state and “l” who sign the contracts, and even leave note of will, at my will, to some beneficiary after I pass away.

Let alone the will after one dies, do we have a will while we are alive? How can I ‘will’ when all of my decisions are made by the neurons and thereby ions at the synapses governed by the laws of quantum mechanics? What’s this “I” that we incidentally capitalise every time we write? I won’t deal much with this flavour of free will but concern myself with a slightly different aspect of it. This version has been baffling neuroscientists and philosophers and let me try to illustrate the other social version through a series of art 22/35

work, visual media and installations.

In this post modern world, we have what I can call an “epistemic advantage”. Assume that an animal has to signal about something to the whole of its species. It will take it years to hint all other animals in the world and it’s impossible that it achieves this feat given the distance it has to travel. Humans with the development of language dovetailed with sophisticated technological tools have created this epistemic web where we can signal the whole world about some immediate danger in less than a few minutes. Technology has simplified our lives and helped us take this quantum leap. Did these technological advancements, rationale and the ideas we have created and carefully fathered constrained our own understanding of the world, in turn? Did we engulf, blind and eternally tangle ourselves in this solacing cloud of digital artificiality that we began to sing an obituary to creativity, originality and enlightenment?

Words like clothes wear out over time and with the repeated usage. Today’s taboo becomes tomorrow’s ritual. Today’s enigma becomes tomorrow’s nuance. Sooner the things get woven into the epistemic hubs, greater they get diluted. Greater is the need to intensify any communicative modality to impact and cater to a set of people with a greater expectations. For instance, children these days don’t enjoy black and white cartoon sketches as children a few generations earlier used to. This is same for all the aspects of society. From happiness to sexuality. There’s a heightened expectation. For instance the number of women one can — sitting at home in front of a computer — access with varied levels of intimacy is million times more than the number of women our great grand father would have met in his whole life. When rarity turns into abundance, it takes an abundant proportion to unleash the original rarity. Mechanisation through repeatability and reproducibility only focuses on Abundance.

Things we interact with, form our day to day reality and thereby shape us. We as a collective society, contribute to shape the things that in turn shape us. The collective consciousness produces this interesting bootstrap. We can ‘will’ to walk to the moon, but we can never literally walk to the moon. We can ‘will’ to drink the the whole water in the ocean, but we can’t do so. We embedded in this universe, given certain sensory modalities, definitely have unbreakable constraints. We can will to do anything, but we don’t have the freedom to do everything we will. This is the duality between “Free Will” and “Freedom”.

Progress is a pendulum that swings between the former and the latter, eventually settling down. Can we will to ride a car? This pertains to epistemics that require an entity called “car” to exist in the society. Can we actually ride a car? This pertains to socio-pragmatic constraints, like economy, healthy body etc., Reality we interact and create constrains both our free will and freedom. In some situations the boundary between free will and freedom becomes blurry. This results in sadness and turmoil. Loss of creativity and originality. Any attempt to increase the freedom through mechanisation results in the loss of the will. If we have all freedom, what is there to will? I indicate this using the demonstration of pornography and the various layers of society that shaped and amplified each other. We started with the question or premise humans have no free will. But do humans have will to understand the difference between freedom and free will? Do we lose the forest for a tree? The symphony for a note? We should always remember that a gilded cage, is, nevertheless, still a cage!

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“Atmosphère X Dasein” ©Dali Wu, Qiao Wan Installation multimedia. 2017 Material: Red scaffolding structure 480 x 190 x 250cm, Two guiding tread ladders 80 x 60 x 75cm, 5 video projectors, Real-time thermal camera Flir T660, several electronic cables and wires, 2 PVC boards, 1 lap-top, 2 speakers, projection fabrics

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Video link: “Atmoshpère X Dasein” Installa9on Documentary, 21’09”, 2017. ©Dali Wu

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Montreal & Munich.

Today we all anchor ourselves in an environment completely transformed by technology.

Let’s think about how we perceive and hear, and create emo,onal ,es via a research-based art piece.

The French word “Atmosphère” indicates the air indispensable to life that creatures breathe, its linguis,c form remains the same in most western languages. It resembles the thing which it refers to: air, or environnement, which is inclusive and phenomenal. As for Dasein, this German word which shines with a philosophical spirit is too par,cular to translate, just like the very “being” (das Seiende) which is defined by the environment. Human being is ques,onner. and if there is no moment when the inten,onality illuminates the ques,oner, the “Atmosphère” will not be formed. X is the icon of the intersec,on and the crossroads.

Dali Wu and Qiao Wan, first lives in Montreal of Canada, a French-speaking city, second in Munich of Germany, they never seen each other in their real life. July 17th, 2017, they took the thermal cameras at the intersec,on points of different railway networks, underground, roads, sidewalks and so on, in their different resident ci,es, they recorded and synchronized the contacts with pedestrians in their respec,ve direc,ons.

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We recorded via machines the moments when the bilateral views and the opposite world intersect, then we made the videos from the moments, videos of dynamic abstract images drawn by human’s temperature. We choose this day as “17.7.17” is a bilateral symmetry, the two 17 are axisymmetric by the middle 7, just as the final visual effects of the installa,on.

“Atmoshphère X Dasein” emphasizes the eternal paradox between the impossibility of true communica,on and the desire for inner inflec,ons with others.

We try to use the high-tech tools to recover the percep,on of space/,me/maMer, to recall the sense of temperature, for environment and for heart. Qiao Wan’s major is art therapy, so this work reflects the considera,ons in this regard. That’s also why I choose the rough scaffoldings as support: first, the confronted images look like the windows of two opposite trains which never cross each other; second, scaffolding is the infrastructure of architecture, and the colour of red symbolizes the temperature which is the most basic substratum of being: human body requires as well a certain temperature in order to maintain its normal func,oning. Moreover, there is the emo,onal temperature in the interac,ons between people. Thus, we use momentarily the thermal infrared cameras to capture the different scenes from where heat Is evident in individuals, in these two ci,es which will never cross each other in physical space-,me. Between Montreal and Munich is six hour ,me difference, similarly, there is as well six hour ,me difference between Munich and Shenzhen of China, where the installa,on took place. The middle image of installa,on is thermal real-,me representa,on of Shenzhen, viewers observe simultaneously their own life, and lives in Montreal and Munich with six hour ,me difference of each.

27/35 Montreal’s thermal map, based on cognitive psychological recognization. Handwriting and drawing by Dali WU.

Munich’s thermal map, based on cognitive psychological recognization. Digital rendering by Qiao Wan.

Montreal(leG) & Munich(right) at 05:05 AM through thermal camera’s eye Extracts of video documentaries link : “Atmosphère X Dasein” 28/35

#Is my Eros your Thanatos?

Lost for long the ďŹ les concealed in the tower of Babel with rocks and stones scaMered around Hanging over the end of the skyline is the deadly tranquility While the mysterious rainbow is yet to fade away Across the rus,c pale wall without touching the rules a dumb escaped from the moon carrying a weak bag ďŹ lled with verb fragments By mere chance and as she is Weaving into the code of her own.

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“Your life is just a dream” Your life is just a dream as a snowflake fragile, uncatchable reflets its infinite shadows within the firmament once only, then fades away into a universal s,llness.

Your life is just a dream ripples on the pool with no depth as one wave aGer the others billows out a pompous citadel, where is the abode of an isolated king who never lost a baMle before but s,ll swiGly died over the mirage Faraway, drops splashing.

Your life is just a dream as a thread of smoke streams thinly penumbras on the window devoid of chains comes and goes sways, under the slan,ng rays of winter sun Your life is just a dream as being part of endless maze Walls give direc,on but hinder you from breaking through Yourself is the start point of chaos Find a way to approve all else paths Wellaway!

If I were aware of this before I’d be much more honest, more brave with myself even more jolly, more sterling Yet the regrets are trivial, beneath the eternal will remain the deepest agonies, and the dream-like life perpetual always, never be soiled nor engulfed

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Patriarchy 2009 Installation Clay sculpture, spot light 200 x 50 x 120 cm

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Wedding ring 2010 Jewelry

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« It is always difficult to ask their soul to stay behind », 2017 acrylic, digital 67 X 84 cm

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« Colors of soul », 2017 acrylic, oil 11 X 14 in

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ÂŤ East female kingdom in Tibet Âť, 2015 multimedia, 172.43 x 112 cm

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