Art Installation
- Sho He
SHUHE is a series of art installations aimed at exploring the ʻinner worldʼ and ʻouter beautyʼ of human beings. With ʻmedical beautyʼ as the background, two studios, File Studio and envyenvy, decided to use metal and plastic ties as the medium, transplanting micro ecological communities into a physical space where they can see each other as equals by inorganic means, to show the abstract flow, processing and transmission of information between science and technology, organisms, cells, and genes, as well as the potential connection between these individual symbols, and beauty.
Ever since the invention of mirror, humans have been working on new ways to perceive themselves. This self-perception or exploration has a rather long history and spectrum, from a face to a body, from a species to the whole world, and settling back to the consciousnesses and souls, and eventually under the beaming light of civilisations, to the unperceptibly micro base unit that defines human—genes.
Humans were, cognitively and intelligently distanced from the cell, the cytoplasm, the nucleus, the chromosome, the DNA and the genes, the same way they were from faraway stars. To shorten the distance, imagination was required. The same with doubting, hypothesizing, verifying and any other abstract actions, imagination is an exclusively human way of perception, generally applied to the micro and macro objects that eyes fail to see.
This set of installation art, named Shu He, meaning the core and cells, is a visualization of the ripples after a bomb of imagination is thrown into the microcosm.
With aesthetic medicine as the background, the cell is one of the obvious ways to showcase the idea, but the rub here is to negotiate the ambience of a a-hundred-year-old traditional Chinese house with the concept of cells, so that the imagination, the images and the train of thoughts in the head can be actualized and represented in reality. The two studios, “envy envy” and “File Studio”, have decided to use metal as the material for the representation and recreation of living micro cells in an actual and perceptible physical space.
Shu, or the core, with a five-meter height and a three-meter diameter, located in the center, peeks out from the red-brick old house, giving out an eerie feeling of an intrusion of an alien from an Hollywood movie. Spreading out from Shu, settling down at random corners of the space, are the fissioned He, namely the neurons and cells, shaped like rugged and bony animal carcusses or wild fungi. Growing from the edge of every single one of the cell are the plastic tentacles. Although inorganic, when tens of thousands of them are arranged densely together like hair, they become lively enough to be almost intimidating. the three primary colors of red, yellow and blue contrast each other and with the woody temperament of the space, adding a beautiful incongruity into it. It stirs in you a feeling of awe that you refrain from touching or even trespassing their territory. The locations of the settlements of these cells are far from random, and if you have to know, let’s say, they are arranged by their God to appear aesthetically pleasing to the human eye.
This is the visualization and indeed magnification of the imperceptible microcosm. From the flat paper to the standing presence that occupies a space, what is being realized here, is not just the thing but the thought. Rising from being overlooked to being looked up, the taking shape of the microcosm brings not only a visual impact but a new way of self-perception that is only possible through the working of imagination.
Now,let us look back on the birth of the Shu He
The aluminum plates that are the bodies of Shu He are ideally malleable, and their connections are smooth. They are laser shaped and pierced, so that the plastic tentacles can hold on to them. The surface looks softly and naturally textured through sanding. In the final stage, these artificial bodies are planted with hair manually, at a speed of 200 strands per hour.
The creation of these installments are more akin to planting and cultivating than producing and sculpting. The creating process witnessed the fissions and reproduction of neurons stimulated by imagination inside the brains of the designers and also the transformation and birth of a concrete physical body that takes up a space from the invisible and abstract mental image. Time, the most just measurement in any process of growth, saw how the thoughts, the imagination of humans, the warmth of human hands and the carving of the machinery provided nutrients for Shu He, enabling the birth, the bloom, the rooting and the fission.
Put into the context of LANLANLI, Shu He symbolizes the technology, biology, cells and genes that are closely related to aesthetic medicine. But in fact, they are no different from the installments of symbols in other spaces and occasions, like deity statues, mirrors, cornices, wind chimes, beams and pillars with dragon patterns or even Teru Teru Bozu.
When looking into the imagery, people are actually oberserving their own imagination and perception, their wishes and dreams. This self-perception or exploration has a rather long history and spectrum, from a face to a body, from a species to the whole world, and settling back to the consciousnesses and souls.
Text writing：言玖
Material: Aluminium,Nylon
Years：2024
SHUHE is a series of art installations aimed at exploring the ʻinner worldʼ and ʻouter beautyʼ of human beings. With ʻmedical beautyʼ as the background, two studios, File Studio and envyenvy, decided to use metal and plastic ties as the medium, transplanting micro ecological communities into a physical space where they can see each other as equals by inorganic means, to show the abstract flow, processing and transmission of information between science and technology, organisms, cells, and genes, as well as the potential connection between these individual symbols, and beauty.
Ever since the invention of mirror, humans have been working on new ways to perceive themselves. This self-perception or exploration has a rather long history and spectrum, from a face to a body, from a species to the whole world, and settling back to the consciousnesses and souls, and eventually under the beaming light of civilisations, to the unperceptibly micro base unit that defines human—genes.
Humans were, cognitively and intelligently distanced from the cell, the cytoplasm, the nucleus, the chromosome, the DNA and the genes, the same way they were from faraway stars. To shorten the distance, imagination was required. The same with doubting, hypothesizing, verifying and any other abstract actions, imagination is an exclusively human way of perception, generally applied to the micro and macro objects that eyes fail to see.
This set of installation art, named Shu He, meaning the core and cells, is a visualization of the ripples after a bomb of imagination is thrown into the microcosm.
With aesthetic medicine as the background, the cell is one of the obvious ways to showcase the idea, but the rub here is to negotiate the ambience of a a-hundred-year-old traditional Chinese house with the concept of cells, so that the imagination, the images and the train of thoughts in the head can be actualized and represented in reality. The two studios, “envy envy” and “File Studio”, have decided to use metal as the material for the representation and recreation of living micro cells in an actual and perceptible physical space.
Shu, or the core, with a five-meter height and a three-meter diameter, located in the center, peeks out from the red-brick old house, giving out an eerie feeling of an intrusion of an alien from an Hollywood movie. Spreading out from Shu, settling down at random corners of the space, are the fissioned He, namely the neurons and cells, shaped like rugged and bony animal carcusses or wild fungi. Growing from the edge of every single one of the cell are the plastic tentacles. Although inorganic, when tens of thousands of them are arranged densely together like hair, they become lively enough to be almost intimidating. the three primary colors of red, yellow and blue contrast each other and with the woody temperament of the space, adding a beautiful incongruity into it. It stirs in you a feeling of awe that you refrain from touching or even trespassing their territory. The locations of the settlements of these cells are far from random, and if you have to know, let’s say, they are arranged by their God to appear aesthetically pleasing to the human eye.
This is the visualization and indeed magnification of the imperceptible microcosm. From the flat paper to the standing presence that occupies a space, what is being realized here, is not just the thing but the thought. Rising from being overlooked to being looked up, the taking shape of the microcosm brings not only a visual impact but a new way of self-perception that is only possible through the working of imagination.
Now,let us look back on the birth of the Shu He
The aluminum plates that are the bodies of Shu He are ideally malleable, and their connections are smooth. They are laser shaped and pierced, so that the plastic tentacles can hold on to them. The surface looks softly and naturally textured through sanding. In the final stage, these artificial bodies are planted with hair manually, at a speed of 200 strands per hour.
The creation of these installments are more akin to planting and cultivating than producing and sculpting. The creating process witnessed the fissions and reproduction of neurons stimulated by imagination inside the brains of the designers and also the transformation and birth of a concrete physical body that takes up a space from the invisible and abstract mental image. Time, the most just measurement in any process of growth, saw how the thoughts, the imagination of humans, the warmth of human hands and the carving of the machinery provided nutrients for Shu He, enabling the birth, the bloom, the rooting and the fission.
Put into the context of LANLANLI, Shu He symbolizes the technology, biology, cells and genes that are closely related to aesthetic medicine. But in fact, they are no different from the installments of symbols in other spaces and occasions, like deity statues, mirrors, cornices, wind chimes, beams and pillars with dragon patterns or even Teru Teru Bozu.
When looking into the imagery, people are actually oberserving their own imagination and perception, their wishes and dreams. This self-perception or exploration has a rather long history and spectrum, from a face to a body, from a species to the whole world, and settling back to the consciousnesses and souls.
Text writing：言玖
Material: Aluminium,Nylon
Years：2024