Wu Shanzhuan – Red Humour International
Inga Svala Thorsdottir, Thor’s Daughter’s Pulverization Service

On the seventh day, God’s creation has been completed; everything is done and God rested.
It said, “The MORE!”
Everything maintains as an open container in the thing’s right.
As an ideal model of the container, what “the MORE” requests is not faith or fetishism, but addition.
Question: What roles do the concepts of “impermanence” and “occasion” play in your works?
Wu: It depends on the causation of materials. If the chance is “cause” and everything has “effect”, then “occasion” doesn’t exist in life. When “occasion” becomes fact, tragedy generates therefore. When I create, the method I use is “adding”. I replace “occasion” by “additive”. If there’s no more room to do “addition”, it means the end has been reached. As for “impermanence”, it follows the same rule.

Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Svala Thorsdottir

Most of the works in this exhibition are the cooperation of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Svala Thorsdottir. They are two islanders respectively from Zhoushan and Iceland. The works are the combination of their common insights and imaginations. They collect the domestic and oversea systems, the life experiences “between” two situations and the different interpretations starting from different experiences. Thorsdottir is not only Wu’s collaborator, but also interlocutor. Wu’s extreme complexity and Thorsdottir’s extreme pureness constitute an interactive relationship. As Zhang Songren said, the relation between Thorsdottir and Wu is the “mirror” relation. The “question mark” reflected in the mirror is the “reverse side” of each other.

In the territory of Chinese contemporary art, Wu Shanzhuan is the most difficult one to be decoded. Wu Shanzhuan defines himself as criminal, intermediary, tourist and labor, so the works he created are not the established artworks but Wu’s Things. From the large amount of “Wu’s Things” in the early 1990s, we see a desire of full opening and “exceeding scale” and his obsession of mathematics and logic which brings a strange sense of truth to his works. For us of the group dominated by a variety of beliefs and rules, this is an “adulterated” truth. Wu Shanzhuan often says, “people are a bunch of useless passion”. The use of his useless passion is to find “useless truth”. For more than 20 years, Wu Shanzhuan has used pseudo-words, thing’s right, parthenogenesis, secondhand water, tourist information, perfect bracket, and the bird prior to peace, to weave his personal ideology. This ideology constitutes a profound criticism to the ideas and experiences that we are used to. In this sense, Wu Shanzhuan’s work is beyond the significance of art history. He is “an artist of world view”. The extraordinary complexity of this artist makes us abandon the use of the words such as “watch”, “stare” and “experience” - in respect of Wu Shanzhuan, we need “reading”. In face of the most complicated and puzzling things in the group of Chinese contemporary art, this reading is spontaneous and long-term. Because of Wu Shanzhuan’s complexity and uniqueness, this reading is marginal and hidden.

After Wu’s meeting with Thorsdottir in 1990, Wu’s complexity became increasingly clear. Thorsdottir, the artist from Iceland, founded “Daughter’s Pulverization Service” in 1992. She ground a variety of different things into powder. Through the process of “pulverization” , Thorsdottir not only eradicates the ready-made identity of “object” by the consistent extreme attitude, but also reaches a reconciliation with the secular things by the way of annihilation. It is the simple and direct gesture that brings their cooperation a peculiar tension between complexity and purity.

Over the years Wu and Thorsdottir’s work has been hidden in the tens of thousands of drafts. From 2008 to this exhibition, their secret is gradually revealed. Art Forum awards this exhibition as one of the best solo-exhibitions in Asia of this year. However, for the real significance, the inspiration and contributions they did to our intelligence and experience, according to the current situation, both people domestic and abroad still lack of necessary cognition.

There is the ultimate secret of conceptual art hidden in Wu Shanzhuan and Thorsdottir. In this era that conceptual art is generally received criticism, their works expose the vitality of concept and the strength of thoughts. They are not the creators of visual spectacle, but the discoverers and subversives of the proposition of truth, and the forgers of ideology. Concerning criticism, Wu and Thorsdottir’s reflection on artists, artwork and the working environment is the most serious and profound of our time. Concerning creativity, they are like the positive and negative poles of generator, constantly bringing out the sparks of ideas and concepts, repeatedly challenging the genesis theology and politics by the profound and peculiar interpretations.

Thing’s Right(s)

Following the exhibition in Guangdong Art Museum, as the first monographic exhibition it takes “Thing’s Right(s)”as the center to demonstrate a series of new works of Wu Shanzhuan and Thorsdottir on this proposition.

In 1995, Wu and Thorsdottir changed the “Declaration of Human Rights” into the “Declaration of Thing’s Rights”, liberating the “thing” from the “chauvinistic rule” that people have on “thing” and “putting back it to its original place”. As the most important clue in the huge system of thinking and creation of Wu and Thorsdottir, the “Thing’s Right” is not something like human right or the well-known property right, but its opposite. The “thing’s rights” are not referring to the rights in themselves as things, because in the “Thing’s Right(s)”, freedom is equal to “exceeding the scale” while right is equal to “thing in itself”.

The contributions that “thing’s rights” make to “human rights” are not only to provide a dimension for reflection and criticism, but an addition. With Wu Shanzhuan’s words, it is to “provide an open capacity to human rights”. For Wu and Thorsdottir, human right is an extremely closed container. In the “Declaration of Human Rights”, the basic rule of human rights - human nature, its own set is very closed. Through the deconstruction by the contemporary scholars like Giorgio Agamben, the limitation of the modern concept of human right has gradually surfaced. In the last 20 years, the contemporary philosophy is always trying to design a new picture for human political life. The method Wu and Thorsdottir offer is the most direct way: The MORE. Everything maintains as an open container in the “thing’s right”. As the ideal model of this container, what “The MORE” needs is not faith or fetishism, but addition. Since 1990, Wu Shanzhuan has started the project of “The MORE”, which exports an intrinsic plural state, making system become plurality - maybe, the most basic form of democracy bases on the tiny plurality.

“Red Humor International” Club

In 1985, Wu Shanzhuan founded the “Red Humor International” club. With his words, he is to inject a kind of “social happiness” into the current system. “Red Humor International” is so far the most profound expression of the Chinese contemporary art to the political issues.

“Red Humor International” is not a physical group, but a concept. It’s a collection of a series of artistic and social concepts, bringing together fascinating humor, wisdom, spontaneous actions of anti-metaphysics, subtle insight into the day-to-day politics, sensitivity to the invisible power system and the basic insistence of democracy.  “Red humor” is an ideological stance, and a collection of grass-root wisdom, thinking experiments and the absurd spirit of contemporary art, like a charming thinking plague. The members of Red Humor International are all the people entering into this thinking field. They are the recognizer, participants and physical evidences of these concepts and works.

The highlight of this exhibition is that, during the exhibition period, the whole building space of “Three on the Bund” will be served as a metaphorical space, a conceptual “provisional club”. “Red Humor International” is not an entity, but a conceptual collectivity. Through the artist’s design, in the Bund which is the convergence of international capital, and in Three on the Bund which represents the most fashionable and luxurious location, “Red Humor International” will become the most attractive point due to its charming wisdom. In the 60th National Day of the Republic, the “Red Humor International” club will bring us a “red fashion”.