How to Read Contemporary Art
Cement words on wooden board (541 characters)
190 x 320 cm
2019
This work aims to demonstrate the complexity of art history. The text forms the names of influential people in the arts: there are two lines, one horizontal, one vertical. The horizontal line is about the development of art and ideas, and lists relevant scholars. The vertical line is about interdisciplinary research in contemporary art, such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, and other interdisciplinary studies. Together they demonstrate the complexity of the history of art.
The sequence of interpretation of this work is: complexity-digestion-extension. The right side of the work represents complexity, while the left side represents a disintegration of complexity. Heidegger’s interpretation of images is biased, so in response to this I disrupted the order of the letters. Shapiro represents positivism, but evidence is not necessarily true, so I used a rigorous reverse order. With regards to Derrida, I reversed the letters and put some of them on the ground to represent a breaking out of and subversion of the border. Using this kind of logic, I want to show that the imagination is not real and that evidence is not real, that truth is variable and dependent on different contexts.