Lu Fang ying

The visible 

with Ye Zhang

Prologue

At first I didn't really know much about Ye Zhang's work. For me, her work is remarkably calm,  seemingly blunt, but intentionally concealing all space for the release of emotion and perception - like standing on a vast snowy plain shouting with no echo - she has no desire to leave any clues to the viewer. To say that my work was inviting the viewer into my safe emotional space to drift along, hers was like a way of saying to me: no, you are not welcome, all you need to do is just look at me. Until one day, we happened to talk about her new painting The Washing Machine, as she asked me if I didn't find it creepy that the inside of the washing machine was dark, sealed and spinning. Quickly, I said, no, I felt at ease imagining being in there, like being in the womb. I think that was the first moment I got Ye's notice. 

Then we decided to make a small piece together with a strong sense of involvement for both the artists and the audience, with a core about the difference in interpretation. This is where the name of the project comes from, as Oscar Wilde says: "The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." And we all love to find the mystery in the things that are ordinary.

Process

We decided that Ye would make neutral images of objects first, and I would translate them into a literal description that is as individual as possible, after reading the objects in the images. During this process I realised that, having both been born in the late 1990s around the south of the Yangtze River, there was a substantial overlap in the commonplace objects we grew up with, thus making it a reunion between myself and my history in itself. In my reflections on still life painting, I have written:" The longer a thing is stared at, the more it seems to detach from itself. The object itself, as an everyday carrier of our subconscious awareness and feelings, becomes a vessel for the concepts projected by both the creator and the viewer." In this gaze at an object that has an unknown meaning to another person, I try my best to catch the spark of honesty generated by the first reaction- what is this item to me?

Presenting

We have discussed several different approaches to the final presentation, each with a particular focus. For example, placing the text and the image on either side of a vertically hung glass panel to make the comparison more difficult; or a linking game in which the viewer connects what they think are matches; or facing the image towards a specially distorted mirror so that the viewer can only quickly read the description of my private feelings about the object, create a corresponding image in their mind and compare it to the object in the mirror... But in the end we decided to present it in a more playful, simple and obvious way: 

We will produce a myriad of tiny stickers with the images of objects, which visitors will be free to take and stick on the wall underneath the descriptions that they think match, so that the whole process of presenting is at the core of our idea: the difference in interpretation.