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).