Tracing the origin of “craft” in Eastern and Western philosophy, Hill of the Madman endorses the idea of crafting as the ability to “know” and to “see”. Through the exhibition, FENG Lixing and WU You gaze upon crafting of 11 artists as both a daily routine and a “non-productive” way of connecting their bodies with material world, and eventually present a collection of subtle yet highly intensified artworks that could be perceived as “madness”.
For artist YUAN Jai, such “madness” lies in the competitive and inter-promoting relation between clouds, rocks and water in either dynamic or static states, portrayed through interlacing colors and lines; for NI Youyu, it is about collaging Freewheeling Trip, a fictional landscape developed with tens of thousands of old photos collected worldwide that are sorted, cropped and reorganized in an “anti-photoshop” way – here, photography is no longer photography, but fragments of time and space; for FU Xiaotong, it is the whispering of needles piercing rice paper countless times, until the pinpricks gradually link into mountains and tempestuous waves; and for SHAO Yinong, “madness” refers to a kind of self-cultivation with perseverance and consistency. He uses oil paint to make an ebony heartwood that has been lying underwater for thousands of years continue to grow: paint, sand, sack, hang ash, and paint again – the unity of time, wood, paint, hands and labor endows the ebony heartwood with new growth rings.
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