M50展览 | 「石化海」童义欣 | Vanguard Gallery

面对他的观众，潜水员想起了卡尔维诺笔下马可·波罗与忽必烈之间的际会[1]，料想着那位伟大的旅行者在向可汗细数那些想象出来的城市时该是何等忐忑。不过，潜水员比马可·波罗有更十足的把握，因为比起后者仅凭的巧语和诗歌，他的证据更加确凿。看啊，潜水员带来的，是石化海里的沉戈。

As the aquanaut stood in front of his audience, he was reminded of the encounter between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan[1], and what it must have been like for the great traveler to convince the emperor with his depiction of imaginable cities. However, the aquanaut had more assurance in himself than Polo, for what he had to present carried more solidity than just prose and verse. Brought with the aquanaut, was the physical evidence of petrified seas.

潜水员陈列的样本是粘土与树脂构成的雕塑，这两种材料模拟了永续的地质过程，如沉淀的化石，如冻结的海水。被这些样本捕获的，有自然的遗落、有机的物质，有人造物也有描画勾勒，诸如渺小天体，图腾样的史前动物，方寸大的捕鱼图。

这些雕塑为我们的目光赋予了近乎上帝的视角，这不仅因为它们凝固不朽的一切都尽在股掌之间，也更因为它们抹除了时间的线性，将相去数亿年的事物藏在了同一个瞬间。它们向人类对时间的体验发问，也怀疑着，那些存在于我们祖先足迹以前的事物，是如何被如今的人类赋予了价值。如此一来，它们也是象征虚无主义的祭品，献给确信无疑的已知世界，也为自然历史的无穷可能埋下了纪念碑。

文 / 李棋

The aquanaut’s specimens were sculptures made of clay and resin, which mirrored the perpetual geological procedures and was analogous to fossilized sediment and solidified water. Preserved in the specimens, there were natural objects, organics, artefacts and graphic evidence, exemplified by celestial bodies, totem-like prehistoric animals and a mini sketch of fishery. 

The sculptures rendered our gaze as one that was akin to God, for not only everything they immortalized could fit in the palm of a hand, but also they erased the linearity of time and packed items hundreds of millions of years apart into a shared moment. They raised questions of how human experience time and how we bestow value upon things beyond even our ancestor’s existence. In this sense, they were nihilistic tokens offered to the definitiveness of the known world, and monuments of the infinite possibilities of natural history.

Text / Li Qi

-----

[1]

伊塔洛·卡尔维诺，《看不见的城市》，1972年

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972