Violin Makers and Seamstresses I: The Caveman, The Literati, The Iconoclast

The power struggle for cultural and political domination of global capitalism gives birth to the contemporary Chinese man. He is shanzhai, a blank slate ready to appropriate, adopt, simulate, and reinvent. He is meta, a spiritual anarchist, old traditions eradicated, leaving us with fertile ground after slashing and burning, or in other words, an existential void, filled up with nihilistic primal aggression. The violin is a metaphor for chaos, entropy, potentia, creation, and decay. Inside the primordial chaos of the cosmic soup, the ontological natures of art-making flirts with the traditional trope of the figure. The unearthing of three distinctive “psychic” modes: The Caveman, The Literati, and The Iconoclast serves as active agents and producers. The unconscious occupation of these roles allows for an anachronistic exploration of the materialist nature of spirituality and the visceral body, interwoven within imagery and the deeply coded systems of objects. The emergence of narratives within a fetishistic and animistic framework constructs and deconstructs realities with leitmotifs across scales to unfold the potential of an evolutionary gesamtkunstwerk as both metaphor and formal manifestation on site. Liminal spaces of contemplation carved out by clinical curtains accommodating millennial nostalgia, fakeness, and decay. Figuration of idiosyncratic subjects confronts the notion of cultural programming, reality manipulation, and portrays human life as a live action role playing game under the culturally void context of a “post-cultural revolution” Chinese accelerationist geist. Looking through the lens of secular nihility, a yearning for post-secular modes of existence and their respective visual language unfolds in the midst of exuberant excess.