π Day
"The mathematician feels one minute of happiness everyday gazing at the crystallized structure of 11:11 for 60 seconds. At 11:12 he told us that we had an ultimate π day in 2015.
If the irrational number indicates time, which keeps branching after 9:26:53, are we approaching moments too short to exist? If the digits are uniformly distributed then all possible stories past, present and future are encoded within?"
objects, photography, videos, texts, artist book
exhibition view, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong
2016
Everyday we receive a Today.
It foretells future events with accuracy of hours, minutes.
Today is the smallest unit of prophecy.
Every year, we celebrate π Day on 3.14.
We had a once-in-a-life-time one in 2015.
At 9:26:53 a.m.
In group exhibition Annals of Floating Island, the infinite decimal expansion is applied as time measurement and index; after crossing Planck time, we search in the archive of The Grand Voyage moments too short to exist.
In the summer of 2014, I started to collaborate with GUO Xi in art project The Grand Voyage. Before departure, we wrote and released twelve prophecies that will happen during a world cruise. From March to May 2015, tracing the sensory experience and mysterious disappearance of Bas Jan Ader and Arthur Cravan, our 86-day journey searched for vanished gazes and solitary figures that once reached out to tangible infinity then disappeared in the ocean.
To play the role of witness, visual testimonies collected along the way are documented and brought back to the continent. In a series of exhibitions, we try to gradually break open the labyrinth of narration by unpacking one thousand parcels and corresponding characters dwelling within, in the constellation of image-evidence-text.
86 copies of Today are part of the collection. It always arrives in the early morning with detailed timetable of all the activities on board.