策展人语 | I SEE YOU, YOU SEE ME (Maybe)

我看，我看见你 ; 你看，你看见我。“看”，拆解又拆解。我与你，也是你与我，也可以不是我也不是你。

我愿因此高歌一曲，尽管我孤身一人处于空荡荡的房间，不过我仍为自己唱歌。当然，和我不同的是，其他人要想唱得好，需要房子里挤满人。可以教人飞翔的人必定会将一切地标转移。因为在他看来，任何标志均会飞走，他会将大地重新命名为“轻盈之身”。与马相比，鸵鸟跑得更快，不过它最终还会将头扎进土地深处——人类也是这样。于人而言，大地和生命相当沉重，倘若想变得身轻如燕，你首先要爱自己。

——尼采，《查拉图特斯拉如是说》

构想展览题目时，听着“没有人能够比我们更接近对方”，脑海里浮现《查拉图特斯拉如是说》的这段文字，键盘上敲打下“I SEE YOU, YOU SEE ME”。这句话无意识地侵入，“我”成为展览的一部分——一个移动的、不确定的、不断生成又不断消解的变量。

我行走、观看、理解，有一套无声的社会语法：椅子是用来坐的，水龙头是出水的，地板是平整的，符号是确指的。这套语法过滤掉了“什么”？只留下了“什么”？

展览始于瑞安·甘德（Ryan Gander）的《创意机器》。那是一块镶嵌在墙上的刻意沾满手印的黄铜铭牌，像一个严谨的公告板，却配有一个诱人的按钮。按下它，一张印有艺术家未实现创意的纸条缓缓吐出，艺术家的想法以英文输出（英文字句还需观看者转译成他理解的语言）。这不是通常意义上的“艺术品”，而是一个将颅内私密思绪公共化的装置。Ryan Gander以一种近乎自嘲的慷慨，承认了创造力的无限与个体生命的有限。我们手握这张印着他人未竟之梦的纸条，成为这些幽灵创意的临时保管者。当原创性被如此轻易地分发，我们关于艺术神圣性的共识是否也随之崩塌？

转身遇见了罗曼·昂达克（Roman Ondak）的《滴水龙头》，水槽支架被倒置悬挂，垂下的铁链系着一个从市场上随意买来的水龙头。水龙头本身，成为了一滴永不滴落的水滴。名词（滴水的水龙头）与动词（正在滴水的水龙头）在此重合，语言和物件的逻辑被巧妙地拧紧，直至产生裂缝。而《大爆炸》更为微妙，孩子们描绘宇宙起源的稚拙画作，环绕着一个红色橡皮泥球。那个看似玩具的球体，却因标题的暗示，彷佛蕴藏着创世的能量。关于“起源”的宏大叙事，与孩童天真且直接的想象并置，哪一种更接近“真实”？

在雷娜塔·卢卡斯（Renata Lucas）的《失败》中，展厅地面被复盖上模块化的胶合板，每个单元都装有把手，邀请观众去拉扯、推动，重新配置这个“地板”。这里没有最终的形态，只有不断变化的临时布局。你我都可以随意改变展览的物理结构，我们既是观者，也是共谋者。所谓的“稳定”和“秩序”，不过是一场临时且脆弱的集体协议。而在《变形》中，一块普通的家庭厨房洗碗巾悬挂着，褶皱与墙上喷绘的字母共同作用，只有在特定角度才能拼读出“transfigura”（变形）。形式与意义、物件与空间、私密与公共，在这些微小的干预中变得模糊不清。我们看见的，是洗碗巾，还是“变形”这个词？或者，是两者之间那个无法被固定捕捉的关系场域？

克拉拉·利登（Klara Liden）则将这种对城市规训的反抗带入更具身体性的维度。《接地》，戏仿了Massive Attack经典MV中的长镜头，但主角不是在街头坚定行走，而是不断在曼哈顿下城的金融区跌倒。“接地”在心理学上是锚定当下的练习，而利登却呈现了一种“被淹没却持续移动”的状态。失败（跌倒）与流动（行走）交织，是对都市生活中“永不停歇”表演指令的温柔抵抗。而《无题（饼干）》和《高积云》，用收集自街头的纸板箱、废弃塑料水箱改造而成。这些被城市新陈代谢排出的“废弃物”，在美术馆中被赋予新的形态和尊严。它们像都市的潜望镜，让我们窥见在光鲜广告牌和高效基础设施之下，那些被遗忘、被压抑的“之间”地带。利登的作品，压迫性并非必然，我们可以“拆解”既定的现实？

何迟的《饥饿》，陶土烧制的块状体（不知道年代，没有明确使用说明），冰冷、坚硬，如同何迟诗句中那句“饥饿是一块硬物质/饥饿是一块脏颜色”。它们可以被随意排列组合，但那种内在的匮乏感却始终存在。这件作品不像其他作品那样直接挑战外部空间的感知，而是转向内里，探讨一种心理现实的建构。我们如何将抽象的情感投射到为可触摸、可观看的实体？如何理解这个实体和我的内心情感的交织？这些“饥饿”躺在展厅，时时提醒着。

赖志盛的《纳凉》，普通的壁扇下两条垂下的拉绳，观众可以随意改变风速和风向。艺术家描述道：“纳凉是一只蚊子与沐浴的风。”现场还有一件悬挂的夹克、半罐茶，以及一只“停在纸张上虚假蚊子。这是一个充满“缺席的在场”的场景。那个刚刚离开的人留下的痕迹，风是制造出的触感，蚊子是想象中的威胁。真实与虚构、享受与烦扰、静止与流动，在这个看似简单的角落达成微妙的平衡。它不试图制造剧烈的故障，而是邀请感官感受变动的现实。

最后，以胡庆泰的《未命名》项目做开放性的结尾。将这种认知的模糊延伸至无法看到的猜测。自2014年至今，他在便条纸上持续进行着“一横一竖，一撇一勾”的书写行为。观众看到的只是漫长过程中的某个不具体碎片，需要“多年耐心等待”并发挥想象力才能完成“拼接和组装”的一句话。艺术在这里不是完成的客体，而是一个永在生成中的、自我显形的过程。我们永远无法看见，我们看见的，只是一个个时间的片段、一个个“字”的切片。然而，真正的全貌重要吗？

你看见的不是我看见的。当象征性的真实和模拟之间的界限不再存在，我们如同身处一个巨大的超真实（hyperreality）剧场。并未试图重建一个更“真实”的世界，相反，通过制造错置、切断叙事、重组感官，清晰地意识到那个我们习以为常的“现实”本身就是建构的、脆弱的、可塑的。目睹同一场景如何因不同的凝视而分裂，亲历“合理”如何轻易滑向“荒诞”。

走出美术馆，展览已经结束，但这场认知的“故障”或许才刚刚开始。有效期限未知。

I see, I see you; you see, you see me. “See” is an action of endless deconstruction. I and you can mean you and me, or neither I nor you.

Thereof could I sing a song - and will sing it: though I be alone in an empty house, and must sing it to my own ears. Other singers are there, to be sure, to whom only the full house makes the voice soft. He who one day teaches men to fly will have shifted all landmarks; to him will all landmarks themselves fly into the air; the earth will he christen anew- as "the light body." The ostrich runs faster than the fastest horse, but it also thrusts its head heavily into the heavy earth: thus is it with the man who cannot yet fly. Heavy to him are earth and life, and so wills the spirit of gravity! But he who would become light, and be a bird, must love himself - thus do I teach. 

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra， Friedrich Nietzsche

While conceiving the title of the exhibition, I was listening to No One Can Be Closer to Each Other Than Us when a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra surfaced in my mind. My fingers tapped the words “I SEE YOU, YOU SEE ME” on the keyboard. The sentence intruded almost unconsciously - “I” became part of the exhibition itself: a fluid, uncertain variable, perpetually in a state of becoming and dissolving.

I walk, look and understand following a silent social grammar: chairs are for sitting, faucets release water, floors are flat, and symbols have fixed meanings. What is filtered out by this grammar system? And what is preserved?

The exhibition begins with Ryan Gander’s Idea Machine. It is a brass plaque mounted on the wall and intentionally covered in fingerprints - like a serious noticeboard - with a button on it, tempting people to press. When pressed, a slip of paper emerges slowly, printed with the artist’s unrealized ideas, in English (waiting for the viewer to translate it into the language s/he understands). This is not an “artwork” in the conventional sense, but a device that renders private thoughts public. With a generosity tinged with self-mockery, Ryan Gander acknowledges the infinity of creativity and the finitude of individual life. Holding a piece of paper bearing another’s unfulfilled dream, we become temporary custodians of these spectral ideas. When originality can be distributed so easily, does our shared belief in the sanctity of art also begin to collapse?

Turning around, we encounter Roman Ondak’s Dripping Tap: a sink stand suspended upside down, with a chain dangling a faucet purchased casually from a marketplace. The faucet itself becomes a drop that never falls. Here, the noun (“dripping tap”) and the verb (“the tap that drips”) converge, and the logics of language and object are ingeniously intermingled together, until they begin to crack. The Big Bang is even more subtle: children’s na?ve drawings of the origin of the universe surround a red ball of modeling clay. The toy-like sphere, hinted at by the title, seems to contain the energy of creation. When the grand narrative of “origin” is juxtaposed with the innocent and wild imagination of children, which comes closer to the “truth”?

In Renata Lucas’s Falha (Failure), the gallery floor is overlaid with modular plywood panels, each fitted with a handle inviting visitors to pull, push and reconfigure the “ground”. There is no final form - only perpetually shifting, temporary arrangements. Anyone can freely alter the exhibition’s physical structure; we become both viewers and accomplices. The so-called “stability” and “order” turn out to be nothing more than a temporary and fragile collective agreement. In Transfigura, an ordinary kitchen dishcloth hangs on the wall. Its folds, interacting with spray-painted letters on the wall, form the word “transfigura” - visible only from a specific angle. Form and meaning, object and space, the private and the public all blur through these subtle interventions. What do we see: the dishcloth, or the word “transfigura”? Or, the elusive relational field between the two that’s beyond capturing?

Klara Liden extends the resistance to urban discipline into a more physical dimension. In Grounding, the artist parodies the long take from Massive Attack’s classic music video. However, instead of striding resolutely through city streets, the protagonist repeatedly falls in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. “Grounding,” in psychology, is a practice of anchoring oneself in the present moment. Yet Liden presents a state of being “submerged but in constant motion.” Failure (falling) and flow (walking) intertwine, forming a gentle defiance against the urban imperative to “keep going.” Untitled (Cookies) and Altocumulus are fashioned from found cardboard boxes and discarded plastic water tanks. These “wastes”, expelled by the city’s metabolism, are imbued with new forms and dignity within the museum context. Like periscopes of the city, they allow us to glimpse the forgotten and suppressed “in-between” zones that exists beneath the fancy billboards and efficient infrastructure. Liden’s work poses the question: if oppression is not necessarily inevitable, can we “dismantle” the given reality?

He Chi’s Hunger features blocks of fired clay (their time of creation unknown and their purposes unclear) lying on the floor. Cold and solid, they are much like the lines from his poem: “Hunger is a solid thing. / Hunger is a filthy color.” These blocks can be arranged and rearranged freely, yet the inherent sense of deprivation persists. Unlike works that directly challenge our perception of external space, this work turns inward to explore the construction of psychological reality. How do we project abstract emotions into tangible, visible forms? How do we comprehend the interplay between these forms and our internal emotions? The embodiments of “hunger” lie in the gallery space, a constant reminder. 

In Lai Chih-Sheng’s Enjoying the Cool, ordinary wall fans are equipped with dangling pull cords, allowing visitors to change the wind speed and direction. According to the artist: “Enjoying the cool is a mosquito and the wind of bathing.” The installation also includes a jacket hanging nearby, half a tin of tea, and a “fake mosquito” perching on paper - a scene filled with “the presence of absence.” The traces of someone who just left linger; the wind is a manufactured sensation, the mosquito an imagined threat. Here reality and fiction, enjoyment and irritation, stillness and flow all achieve a delicate balance in this seemingly simple corner. Rather than creating a drastic disruption, the work invites our senses to perceive a shifting reality.

Finally, Hu Qingtai’s Untitled project provides an open-ended conclusion, extending this cognitive ambiguity into the depth of speculation. Since 2014, he has engaged in a continuous act of a writing, marking notepads with “one horizontal, one vertical, one slash, one hook”. What the viewer sees is only an arbitrary fragment from a long process, a sentence that can only be “pieced together and assembled” with “years of patient waiting” and imagination. Art here is not a completed object but a perpetual process of becoming and self-manifestation. We can never perceive the full picture; what we see are merely fragments of time and cross-sections of “word.” But in the end, does the full picture even matter?

I see you; you see me. But you do not necessarily see what I see. When the boundary between symbolic reality and simulation dissolves, we find ourselves in a vast theater of hyperreality. This is not an attempt to reconstruct a more “authentic” world; instead, by creating displacements, breaking narratives and reconfiguring perceptions, it makes us acutely aware that the “real” we take for granted is in itself fabricated, fragile and malleable. We witness how the same scene fractures under different gazes, and how the “reasonable” slips easily into the “absurd”.

As we walk out of the museum, the exhibition come to the close – however, the “glitch” in our perception may have only just begun. Its duration remains unknown.

关于

策展人

About 

Curator

张莉娸

Zoe Chang

策展人、独立撰稿人

萃舍云集特聘艺术总监

曾任昊美术馆执行馆长。作为中国当代艺术资深实践者，策划、组织完成百余项国内外艺术展览、项目与活动；关注年轻创作生态的成长与更新，建立持续的交流机制，在行动中推进并形成更多可能。   

Zoe Chang, Curator, Independent writer, and former HOW Museum executive director.As a seasoned practitioner in Chinese contemporary art, She has curated and organized over a hundred art exhibitions, projects, and events domestically and internationally. As an independent writer for art media and a video art collector, she focuses on the growth and renewal of the young creative ecosystem, establishing continuous exchange mechanisms to foster and realize more possibilities through action.

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