Lisha Nie - Inanimate Reason
2021.07.24 - Next Exhibition
23.13°, 113.27°, 2021
High Density Foam, Stone Paint
Black Sun Under the Blue Sky, 2021
Wood
23.13°，113.27°, 2021
High Density Foam, Stone Paint
Dear, We Cannot Control It to Exact 20 Centimeters, 2021
Steel, Wood, Tires
Of the Presence of the Sun #01, 2021
Inkjet Print On Reflective Cloth
Of the Presence of the Sun #03, 2021
Inkjet Print On Silk
Into the Gorgeous Crush Of Everything, 2021
Single-Channel Video with Audio, 09’14’’
Performance
Lisha Nie - Into The Goregous Crush of Everything
Feat. racing rain & mafmadmaf
2021. 10.17
The massive structure denotes a seemingly rational certainty,
an impossible certainty.
Do you remember the sounds of the sea,
and their utter emptiness?
They are neither meaningful,
nor meaningless.
They are acoustic waves with unprecedented movements.
They are timeless, fluid, iterative but non-identical.
Above all,
They cannot be thoroughly described, calculated, and imitated.
For me, the making of works is an "action" of stretching out my hands against
the world, a record of some indescribable emotion and sensibility, and finally
reflected as a tangible entity. In this exhibition, the creative materials are mostly
taken from my observations of daily life, political scenes, and artifacts in technical
images. I am like a collector, integrating and remanufacturing information. Links
are formed between works, one work draws meaning from another work, and
transmits meaning to the next work.
The idea from Inanimate Reason was born in early 2021, and its present at bottom
space is not the end but the process. At that time, many people were still in a state
of isolation at home, and we all curled up in our own corner, indulging in the world
of images. The production of Of the Presence of the Sun also started from that time.
In my spare time, I will use cyanotypes on the windowsill of the living room to rely
on the sun's rays to make a picture of the sun taken in space downloaded from
NASA. Relying on such a traditional way of making images, the light of the sun
leaves a little bit of tangible evidence in my life from the distant darkness.
Variations in time, UV intensity, and pigment concentration lead to the ultimately
variable results.
The original material of Into the Gorgeous Crush Of Everything also comes from
NASA. It is a miracle that we can look at the sun in such a close-up way. I
collected a large number of sun images and fed them into a generative adversarial
network which is a way for artificial intelligence to generate image. Even though
machine learning has the ability to generate image of sun that looks real enough to
confuse people, I chose to capture the in-progress moment. While watching the
video, you may still be able to hear the sound of my breathing, and the fire of
burning the bushes. They reach every corner of this semi-open space in the form
of sound waves.
Black Sun Under the Blue Sky and 23.13°, 113.27° are another imagination and use
of the image of the sun. The sun as a symbolic image has evolved throughout the
history of the political landscape and has always represented supreme power.
Dear, We Cannot Control It to Exact 20 Centimeters is a representation of power
and natural life. Wild trees are felled and replaced with delicate saplings that require
fixers; straight roots are produced and shipped everywhere as decorations.
Inanimate Reason is named after Carl Gottlieb von Windisch's 1783 collection of
letters about the trick of Mechanical Turk-a deceptive automaton chess player. He
revealed the technical illusion of the puppet robot step by step from the perspective
of a witness. After the deception was revealed, the Mechanical Turk was collected
in the Chinese Art Museum in Philadelphia. Because of a fire, only a piece of ashes
remained in the end. Silas Weir Mitchell wrote that "the last words of our departed
friend, the sternly whispered, oft-repeated syllables, chess! chess!" One thing to
point out is chess has another meaning in French - failure.
Inanimate Reason is the first solo exhibition in China by Nie Lisha. By utilizing
video, sound, computer-based media, and installation, Lisha Nie creates non-linear
and non- linguistic ways of storytelling. Digital production is a recurrent foreground
in Lisha’s work, in which she critically examines its usage and circulation in the
power systems and daily life. Thriving from personal history and contemporary
environments, her recent works explore the relationship between individual and
collective in technologically mediated society from the perspectives of
totalitarianism and late capitalism, as well as their existential impacts.
Lisha Nie was born in Chongqing, China, holds a BFA in Painting from
Rhode Island School of Design. Her recent exhibitions include
Paradise Palase (New York, USA); Times Art Museum (Chengdu, China),
Woods- Gerry Gallery (Providence, RI), Jiade Art Center (Beijing, China),
Wanying Art Museum (Shijiazhuang, China), Red Eye Gallery(Providence, RI),
A4 ARIE Art Center (Chengdu, China), Yuan Contemporary Art Museum
(Chongqing, China), Gelman Gallery(Providence, RI). Her recent awards includes
Presidential Scholarship, Anderson Ranch Arts Center(Colorado, USA);
Florence Leif award(Rhode Island, USA); Partial Residency Fellowship,
Nars Foundation(New York, USA).