The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

49 ARTISTS The only question is how to endure – Immersing 2017 Wood and metal shelves, archival pigmented inkjet prints mounted on diabond and glass / 180 x 180 x 10cm / Courtesy: The artist and Bank MAB Society, Shanghai CHEN ZHE Born 1989, Beijing, China Lives and works in Beijing Chen Zhe’s finely realised photographic imagery explores what she describes as ‘the ambiguous meeting point between visual representations and language’. 1 Chen first attracted attention — and some notoriety — for her photo series and artist books Bees (2010–12) and The Bearable (2007–10), which contained unflinching, though uniquely measured, contextualisation of communities of self-abusers she met in internet forums. With unusual frankness and sensitivity, she documented wounded personalities in relation to their physical bodies through a collection of correspondence, diary entries, online chats and imagery that is at once sumptuous and challenging. Since 2012, Chen has been engaged in a long-term investigation of visual and linguistic representations of dusk as a way of coming to terms with her own uneasy feelings towards this state between light and darkness. Working under the title Towards Evening: Six Chapters and using six conceptual ‘filters’, Chen explores human responses to the twilight hour, with a particular focus on the psychological space created by the gathering of darkness. So absorbed has the artist become in the project that she schedules annual exhibitions of her accumulating archive — ‘reconstructions’, as she describes them — as a means of marking time. Towards Evening has a deeply literary aspect, and Chen includes her own writing alongside extracts from a wide range of sources as she experiments with modes of display. Entries in the series include a suite of images inspired by the short story The Red Cocoon by Japanese absurdist Kobo Abe, notes on a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, and a reference book cataloguing and categorising types of ‘evening uneasiness’, with an accompanying video and sound piece. Appropriately, the project is organised into ‘chapters’ consisting of several ‘sections’, 2 while its overall title is drawn from a celebrated quatrain by ninth-century Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin: Towards evening my soul was disquieted; And I urged my carriage up to this ancient plateau. The setting sun has a boundless beauty; Only the yellow dusk is so near. With this disquiet in mind, The only question is how to endure — constituting Section II of the first chapter of Chen’s undertaking — is composed of four large black cabinets that frame a collection of images and documents. Each represents a different approach as to how to spend the hour of dusk: waiting for darkness ( Immersing ), feeling the weight of time’s passing ( Resisting ), savouring the sunset and the promise of night ( Seizing the moment ), or contemplating its profundities ( Understanding eternity ). From the intimacy of a pile of bedsheets against a last burst of golden sun to the gossamer wonder of a spider colony and arcs of candle flame, Chen’s evocative photographs depict the unmistakable tonal shift as late afternoon light gives way to darkness and skies redden then fade. These are grouped aside illustrations from Chen’s study — phases of the moon, visions of the cosmos, scientific imagery and religious iconography — and quotations from a wide range of literary sources: Edgar Allan Poe, Simone de Beauvoir, exiled Chinese artist Gao Ertai, decadent novelist Sakaguchi Ango, the philosophical pessimism of Emil Cioran, and the words of Vincent van Gogh to one of his students. Chen Zhe’s archive plays on possible readings between image and text, photographic representation and poetic language. As illuminating as her selection may be, it also leaves space for interpretative slippages — she quotes art critic John Berger on the inseparability of meaning and mystery — which is entirely appropriate to the enigma of the evening disquiet. Reuben Keehan Endnotes 1 Artist statement, in Chen Zhe: Towards Evening [exhibition guide], Bank MABSociety, Shanghai, 2017, unpaginated. 2 Along with an introduction, Chen Zhe has completed three of the chapters to date: Chapter I: The Uneven Time , Chapter II: Nightfall Disquiet and Chapter III: The Red Cocoon . The final three chapters are projected to be Between Identities , Two Kinds of Light and Erebus , which will be followed by an epilogue.