Kang Jing: 罚死他Faster

Where Where Art Space
Curated by: Liu Li Bin
Opening: Saturday, August 27, 4:00 pm
Exhibition: 2011/08/27- 09/25
Website: www.wherewhereproject.com
email: wherewherecc@gmail.com
Phone: 135 2102 1603

Where Where Art Space (WWAS) presents the first solo of Kang Jing that brings together his video, sculpture, and installation work. The exhibition has been guest curated Liu Li Bin.

In his preface to the exhibition Lui Li Bin writes:

Watching Kang Jing run through the dense traffic on the 4th Ring road in his recent video work, I feel his bravery, if not more the bitterness that accompanies it. To move faster is the fate of our time, we are a slave to it, from our everyday acts to our basic psychology. To take time, to slow down becomes a luxury as we lose the ability to control the speed of things. It is only by speeding up that we can feel alive and grounded.

In naming his exhibition I phonetically translated Faster into 罚死他, literally meaning “to punish him to death.” This highlights Kang Jing’s act, which looks courageous, but is also desperate and hysterical. It echoes his working method: an obsessive approach that replicates the object out of related materials. This camouflage is his weapon in carrying out close examinations. The verb sculpt in Chinese is made of Diao and Su, which respectively stand roughly for “rearticulate by going into detail,” and “building by adding and shaping.” For example he rearticulates a stiff branch into a new but delicate and graceful branch (in the work “Be Natural Please”); while in “Inch by Inch” clay is reshaped into a carpet.
Last month China experienced the tragedy of the high-speed train crash in Wen Zhou. “Faster” makes more evident the challenges faced in China for clear solutions and actions that foster social changes. Liu in commenting on Kang’s work notes that “the fight to be fastest is a disease, this obsession to be faster a growing cancer.” We can clearly realize how effectively art and criticism foresee and force us to reflect on the world we are in.