"I, Stand in A Room That Holds The All" is an interactive installation in which the work is presented in the form of a hollow wall, along with a handmade art book. "Las Meninas" and a central control box full of switches are placed Inside the hollow. Words, images, texture materials, and ready-made products are united orderly on the two sides of the wall. The texts of the two sides of the wall are taken from Andersen's fairy tale "The Porter's Son" and the first chapter, "Las Meninas", from Foucault's "Order of Things". I used the perspectives of Foucault and Andersen to rethink "Las Meninas" which was painted by Velázquez. Through the different cognitive boundaries between Them, the discussion concerning the subjectivity in "Las Meninas" is brought out and re-examined. Here the audience can join their discussion. They can choose to go to any side of the wall, interacting with the work by moving the plug or walking into the hollow space and poking the "Las Meninas" to randomly turn the switches on and off. The correspondence between the switch and the lights on the two walls is unknown. Thought can perceive only its projection and the recognition of its frontier. People will see things around them in a specific way, and the relationship between this most essential so-called "specific way" and subjectivity is exactly what I want to explore and discuss.
I, Stand in A Room that Holds The All
Book, interactive installation, mixed material
Wall 300 x 76 x 270 cm, Book 14.8 x 21 x 0.5 cm
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I, Stand in A Room that Holds The All
Install(overview)
I, Stand in A Room that Holds The All
Install(inside)
In the painting, "Las Meninas", created by Velázquez, the views of the work is not only the perspective of the princess and other seven people in the picture, but also the perspective of the painter himself, the person looking back, the king and queen in the mirror, and the spectator who looks at the picture. Under the conversion of different identities and perspectives, the subject changes. Subject consciousness and environmental perception communicate in the "space outside the picture" and "space within the picture". The subject's identity may be Velázquez himself, maybe the onlooker's perspective of being an outsider, maybe the incarnation of the king and queen in the mirror, or "I". All of these identities are derived from the environment in which this painting is created. , These identities are all in the world of pictures. Regardless of whether it is the subject in the picture or the subject of "I", they are all hovering between "being" and "nothing". The cognitive world of any of those identities provides a different perspective to the world in this painting. It proves Heidegger's saying: "Human beings exist through the existence of the world, and the world exists because of the existence of human beings." The individual is the existence of the world. Different cognitive worlds possessed by individuals provide them with their own methodology to define the existence of the world.
I imagine, when a person's cognitive forms and thoughts emerge from the body, they exist separately. So I named the side which stored Andersen's view Ander, and Foucault's side Frank. Ander's perspective has the conscious experience of knowing the world for the first time, showing that the individual's understanding of the world at an early age is influenced and determined by the environment. This cognitive form of looking at things from Andersen's perspective is pure and naive, just like a fairy-tale understanding of the unknown from the perspective of children; While Frank has a more mature, rational, and essential thinking habit. When interpreting the painting "Las Meninas", Ander and Frank stand oppositely at certain degrees, and a dialogue has been created between them at the same time. When cognition is opposed, whether the information is right or wrong is not prior anymore. When information is summarized in the mind and transformed into cognition, it is being stored like files, specimens, and slices. The text is extracted, the concept is vacuumed, and only the structure remains.
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In the middle of the hollow wall is "Las Meninas" created by Velázquez. Behind this picture is a Central Control Box, and thirty-seven light switches are all installed in the box. In the painting, there is a discussion of self-referentiality. This kind of thinking flows between the viewer and the work, a cognition with unlimited possibilities. The "subjectivity" will gradually extend out of the boundless space in the constant conversion, and the boundary of the cognitive space will expand indefinitely as the individual-centred cognitive approach is lost. As a subject or cognitive form other than Frank and Ander, the audience enters the hollow area and can feel the switch and control the lights on the external wall by poking the "Las Meninas". Without a process of trial and error, the audience can hardly know the connections between the lights and the switches, which provides randomness for the original dialogue between different cognitive individuals, and also demonstrates the process by which individuals recognize things and information when forming the cognitive boundary that defines the existence of the world.
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I, Stand in A Room that Holds The All
Andy side
I, Stand in A Room that Holds The All
Frank side
When a cognitive perspective is established, its opposite cognitive perspective provides the possibility of reshaping this cognitive boundary, and this reshaping comes from the random selection of other individuals, the switch controller. The audience blocked the circuit by pulling and changing the position of the plug, walked into the hollow area of the wall and operated the central control box to perceive the information input. These behaviors also break the stability of the original dialogue between Ander and Frank while experiencing the boundaries of self-cognition. In the course of such interaction, the audience also helped the painting returning to the infinite possibilities of its own meaning.
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![](https://format.creatorcdn.com/7d41f2af-ac6a-4f5e-bd82-a49485590d7e/0/0/0/0,0,2290,1568,2290,1200/0-0-0/7e71bb5a-1b3c-498d-9c8c-82eb5d773d18/1/1/%E6%88%AA%E5%B1%8F2022-04-05+%E4%B8%8B%E5%8D%882.17.50.png?fjkss=exp=2037610037~hmac=c00b1d471d503a32186d2884f81df0f0c4fceff64c666ba69f7f48f012572678)