Question a Brick Wall
2020
An enormous black question mark is silhouetted against a wall composed of hundreds of consumer-brand logos. At the foot of the mark, a single small figure crouches, dwarfed by the wall of signs. Made in 2020, the photograph frames globalization as a question — both as the subject and the answer — that the individual can only sit beneath and stare up at.
Question a Brick Wall, 280×180cm, 2020
Artist’s Statement
Around the end of 2019, the pandemic erupted in Wuhan, China and quickly spread out to the world. It breaks down our life and work routine. At the beginning, I just wanted to practice calligraphy. I chose some cheap advertising paper I used to write and scribbled some brands and their advertisements collected over these years. When I realized that this pandemic would not be over within a short period of time, I began to write in a neater manner, thinking of a new way to present this work in the exhibition that would open on July 11. As planned, the theme of the exhibition would be the title of the work “Question a Brick Wall”.
This work was not as easy as making “Competition” in 2004 or “Debacle” in 2009. This time I was not writing calligraphy, but rather drawing and painting calligraphy and logos in more clarity and detail. I must draw each one repeatedly and paint many times one layer on top of another layer. In total, I did about 400 pieces of advertising paper within four months. The installation is 8.3 meters in height and the width is almost 5.4 meters at Tang Contemporary in summer 2020.
On this huge poster wall, there are nearly 1,000 corporate brands, mainly those of Fortune 500 companies. The rest are some most recent popular product brands on the Internet, some common ones in our lives, including logos of art galleries and cultural institutions, and several brands from my hometown Jinzhou, Hubei Province. There are also my favorite and commonly used product brands. It took me more than four months to hand paint all these advertisements. Every day, I lay on the table for more than 10 hours. I sat on the sofa for so long that “carved” out a big hole into the sofa. My presbyopia glasses changed from 100 degrees to 300 degrees. So, it is not exaggerating at all to say that I spent a great deal of time and energy into making this work.