Author: Haotian Liu

In my performance piece, I’m thinking about incorporating a Buddhists’ religious ritual to create a sense of “alienness” to this campus of little cultural diversity. One approach is to video record the process of performing this ritual with the audience’s reaction in the background.  The performance artist Kimsooja’s A Needle Woman is a successful precedent.

A site-specific artwork is an artwork that carries special meanings in certain contexts it’s placed at. It could vary from sculpture, sound to performance.  Site comprises a unique combination of physical elements, such as depth, length, weight, height, shape, walls, temperature.  The artists utilize these physical elements to convey a message to the audience, or let the audience participate into the work created.  The connection between site and art is the key to site-specific artwork.

Doing research of chairs in artists’ work gave me a better understanding of the chair’s generic form and what kind of self-expressions could be embodied into the work of art.  After seeing the paintings of artist Xuhui Mao, I realized how closely one’s identity could be associated with the works he or she created.  And this triggered me to create a series of chairs associated with my memory of childhood, teenage years and college life.

Chair and Authority

1. The author pointed out that taking offense as a rationalization for censorship is inappropriate.  The right to define art  belongs to everyone, but not only one community.  The development of art would be refrained if people always take the moral high ground in criticism.  “There is a deeply puritanical and anti-intellectual strain in American culture that expresses itself by putting moral judgment before aesthetic understanding.”
2. The explicit equivalence between representation of a black boy in the painting and lynching activity is not logical.  The painting, compared to the lynching happened decades ago,  is much more abstract and  well-intended.
3. The right to speak for the whole black community should’t only be defined by the black community since they are not necessarily the most educated people on racial problems.
4. We need artists and curators who lack formal opportunities to engage with critical race discourses and histories of anti-racist cultural production.