This small installation named “Can You Hear Me”, and it is mainly composed of medical bandages, used mobile phones and micro-jet printing photos. It's 400mm x 500mm x 50mm.
This piece is a response to the lockdown situation. It inspired by hand-made homework, and connects to the emotion I had during the New Normal theme by using some elements in the epidemic to talk about a kind of inaccessibility and ineffective communication, and also intent to share the feeling of powerlessness with audience.
The main inspiration for this work comes from “Breathe In/Out”, an exhibition hold by Wang Huangsheng. I really admire his use of life-related elements, for example, he used a lot of oxygen cylinders to explain the fragility and maintenance of life. He also combined masks with Chinese painting rubbings, which inspired me to use bandage. Another main source of inspiration for me is “The Wrapped Reichstag” made by famous artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Christo used a lot of white fiber materials to wrap the Reichstag building, which made me interested in wrapping. After the sketch design and element extraction on the sketchbook, I decided to use white medical items as the raw material for the package, giving it the concept of "inaccessible". Because I wanted to convey my concerns about my hometown of Wuhan during the epidemic, I took a photo of Wuhan before the closure and printed it out as a background. Then a very important point is how to connect me and Wuhan. I have always liked Nam June Paik’s video works. In 1983, he made a robot called “Family of Robot”, which was a combination of electronic display screens of different brands of different sizes. This work contains the element of family, and I think of it when we were unable to meet, contact, or contact the loved ones we missed during the epidemic. Therefore, I changed the electronic screen to a mobile phone that can communicate in a single line, and went to the second-hand mobile phone market to bring a batch of old and unusable mobile phones to interpret the concept of "untouchable". Finally, I wrapped them together, fixed the bandage with small pieces of glue of different sizes, wrapped them around the old phone, and wrapped them together with the big photo on the back.
