The Grand Voyage: An Iron-hearted Man, 2015

Hong Kong 2016
The Grand Voyage: An Iron-hearted Man

ShanghART Gallery

Sculpture
27.0 x 25.0 x 11.0 (厘米)
10.6 x 9.8 x 4.3 (吋)
He opened the package worriedly, finding that there was only a Venus Flower Basket with a tag that reads: “You make me cry”. He was well aware that when this object returned, a friend was forever gone. A friend who was keen on purchasing souvenirs and obsessed with erecting monuments in their shared life continually via stereotyped and crudely made objects has set off towards an unmarked realm on her own, leaving only this skeleton from the deep ocean. The day before he embarked, he scanned the glass sponge and inscribed it to his left foot by 3D tattoo. Laser light punctured intensive wounds, reproducing the shape and texture of the remains— tiny holes weaved by filiform bone needle and a net like interlacing ribs made of three thousand tiny holes whose perimeter was two millimetres each — he was in desperate need of such invisible pain to secretly and thoroughly occupy the ensemble of images it evoked. Pain, a call from the deep dale, brings us back to the edge of daily consciousness and catches us in a dilemma where we keep screaming “It hurts as if my liver and intestines are cut into inches!” and “It rips my heart, cracks my lung!” while an answer was given repeatedly from the valley bottom “Point it to me!” The coordinate formed by pricks within body endowed the overwhelming and unspeakable pain with a precise shape, location and size. In the three months of voyage, his invisible prosthesis was becoming unprecedentedly real. This lukewarm cub he reared was supplied with blood and accompanied him towards the innermost that was unbearable to recall, all the way till the wound healed. We noticed an odd gentleman beside the swimming pool on Deck 9 who shivered seriously in the scorching South Asian weather. He lay on the yellow deck chair, confessing in every lattice generated by the wound. The burning sun went through his tendon, squamous epithelium, granulation tissue and preliminary cicatrix, casting a rosy shade.