CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - YI CHEN True Fictions: The Fictionalized Self as a Response to Apocalyptic Dislocations in the Art of Bada Shanren and Iris Häussler
When Friedrich Nietzsche exclaimed: “Wo ist der Wahnsinn mit dem ihr geimpft werden müsstet?“ he was not speaking of vaccination. On the contrary, his “impfen” is inoculation, like yoghurt, or like sourdough, an absolute transformation of substance; mad to the bone. Let us look to the 17th century Chinese painter Bada Shanren, a prince of a deposed dynasty, who saved his life by escaping into the role of an idiosyncratic outsider, speaking truth in hermetically ambiguous, indomitably alive brushwork; let us look at the fictitious biographies that contemporary German-Canadian installation artist Iris Häussler created, characters who express their fundamentally humane position through an “art” of compulsive everydayness. Both Bada Shanren and Häussler posit the secure familiarity of an increasingly fictionalized self against the incoherent world around them and their ritual, gestural incantations of art become a protective spell. And when I say, let us “look”, I mean this literally: My project seeks to transcend abstract conceptualisation through a methodology of “deep viewing” and non-metaphoric comparison, to facilitate collaborative discourse, and to arrive at a deeply personal understanding of the possibilities of art as a response to apocalypse; whether for an I, or for us.