Surface press
Paraffin, Mixed media
Variable
2020
Explanation:
With the development of technological innovation in the
21st century, the function of books as a representative
of knowledge has been weakened, leaving the only
body gradually.
Books are decoration, books are furnishings. Books
are not knowledge, but indoor aesthetics and display .
In my spare time, I realised that nearly half of the books on my shelves had not
been flicked through by me, and after some introspection, I was also painfully
aware that I don't yet scrutinise every work in the exhibition which I'm viewing,
neither do I click on every material which I've transferred to my network disk to
consult. Earlier in my life, I was not such a person, but this is not a unique
personal phenomenon. In this age of information and productivity, we have too
little energy to exhaust what we have produced, but at the same time we have a
desire to learn about it, and so we 'hoard'. In this state of hoarding, we become
concerned only with the superficiality of things, satisfied and stopping at a limited
moment of "ambiguous perception".
People created the written word, and books were the classic form for carrying
texts and information. But the book is no longer the dominant medium for
conveying information in modern life, because we now have many new ways of
storing it. The book is no longer just a frame, and this form of storage is
beginning to fail. "The situation of "vague knowledge" is rapidly occurring in the
book, but the form of the book will not be easily abandoned; it still serves as a
symbol of knowledge, but behind the symbol it is despised by people like me.
Information that is not extracted is like looking into a fog, beautiful but not really
perceived.
I have taken the shell of a book and sealed it in paraffin wax with various
realistic objects of my choice, because of its physical properties the book cannot
be turned over, only the shell can be perceived. At the same time, each book I
created was named, categorised and displayed on a shelf (e.g. Electronic Age/
Publisher's Tombstone/Famous People Biography) so that each book could be
categorised and retrieved and taken down for viewing. The blurred shells are an
allusion to my 'ambiguous perceptions', allowing the viewer to map the overall
situation from their own perceptions