Zeng Jiujian

Resin is artificial amber

Soap is industrial fat

Traditional museums reveal to mankind that all history is contemporary history, and all contemporary culture is a relic of the metamorphosis of history. It is a brutally exposed display of material archaeology; archaeology itself is a violent dissection of the sedimentation of history, and the exhibition is the production of specimens for history. And the revision of history itself is involved in the projection and construction of a discourse of the future, where the past and the future are connected through the cause and effect of material creation.

As technology advances and historical artefacts and relics are scanned by museums, museum systems are gradually digitised and models of the artefacts are shared open source to the audience. And digitisation means that the information conveyed by matter becomes fluid. The material form remains the original condition, but digital sharing means that the meaning of its materiality itself will be transformed and extended in society under the influence of new media. In other words, the alienation of the cultural symbols of decentralised digital historical relics is an inevitable event in the contemporary era.

Humanity interprets and insinuates particular histories according to the needs of the present, and the histories within our gaze are merely fillers for the gaps we have in the present. As a reflection of history, post-mythic narratives grow in the overlapping cultural landscapes of the world, following the fluidity of history and flowing in all directions.

The current Internet medium is turning the world into a giant museum, and all history will eventually become a moving mountain in the course of time.

In traditional societies, the individual family was the main unit of production. In modern China today, the traditional agricultural family unit has been slowly deconstructed and redefined in the process of industrialization. At the same time, today China continues to develop rapidly, the production and consumption of honeycomb briquettes are greatly restricted by the strong policies of local governments (regulation of briquettes manufacturing and market because of carbon neutrality policy), and the promotion of natural gas systems in the vast rural areas. Behind this is the contradiction between the progress of the productive forces of the whole society and the urgent need to protect the disappearing, spiritual, material and cultural heritage. At the stage of the traditional agricultural society's continuous transformation to modernization, the society urgently needs to explore how to maintain the balance between social cognition recognition and historical development.

Zi Sha Tao(ceramic) honeycomb briquette is the material monument of thousands of families' daily past, reflecting and recalling the development of China. Black briquette burns and turns to ash and earth, while grey clay transforms to black ceramic. Through the medium of the ceramics, symbols of flammability solidify in the burning, and the values behind the contents continue to participate in the construction of future history. How can society construct an immaterial monument of common identity to the continuous spirit?

"Everyone looks in the mirror, but no one sees the mirror."

Everything is a mirror, the world is born in the iteration of their reflections on each other. The mirror is a reflective dune, and the "image of me" is a non-reflective mirror; behind the mirror, the "non-reflective everything" is connected.

And when we look at the artwork, what do we see?

Everything Is Sculpture: Immaterial Constructions/Material Realities sets out to interrogate new contexts and issues that draw from and affect the production and reception of sculpture today. Sculpture's continual engagement with social, political and economic spatialities both in terms of immaterial constructions and material realities is one way in which sculpture acts in the world. The talk series is designed to locate the idea of sculpture as a central component of the ways that we, as artists, actively try to understand, express and determine our environment and culture. This publication includes contributions from invited speakers that took part in the EiS talk series between 2018—2021: The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, Edwin Coomasaru, Jago Cooper, Rebecca Edwards, Ludwig Engel, Lisa Le Feuvre, Ian Kiaer, Virginia Nimarkoh, Kirsten Norrie, Dave O'Brien, Stephen Sutcliffe, Rebecca Tamás, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Thomas J. Price and Helen Wickstead.

Edited by:

Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Joanne Tatham

In the filed of absence

Even the text is absent

And nothing is moving

There is nowhere to stand