Junchao Ren

My work is related to the transformation of space by people in the city. In my walks around cities, I have discovered that there is a risk of spontaneous transformation of urban space by citizens. These practices can be described as micro-spatial urban practices (proposed by Kurt Iveson), which directly intervene in urban space, with residents consciously or unconsciously resisting modern urban space. The absence of residents' participation in the construction of urban space contributes to the dehumanization of urban space. The subject of action in the construction of urban space is not the user. As a result, the spatial design and layout of the city are often abducted by bureaucracy and functionalism, and urban space is organized simplistically and uniformly. Henri Lefebvre points out that urban space is a symptom of a deeper capitalist operating structure; the formation of cities is a process and a result of the operation of capital. I am concerned with how inhabitants solve the problem of survival by transforming, building, or piercing space when confronted with the problem of living. This informal approach to problem-solving is not the standard design that designers are taught in the academy; the creativity of the inhabitants is not regulated by the standard design education, and the solutions are freer and more adaptable to the local context.

Neither micro-spatial urban practices nor do-it-yourself urban design (a concept developed by Gordon C. C. Douglas) seeks or has the means to shape the spatial layout of the city as a whole. Citizens make spatial corrections (alterations) at the micro-level through their power. Such adjustments are often spontaneous, loosely organized, if at all, and often unsanctioned。

I have used different collected materials (abandoned furniture, construction scraps) to create artificial structures that are formed in a similar way to the temporary structures that people live in. I wanted to create a landscape that was made up of man-made structures that had been removed from the buildings. Before we remove the structures when they are functional they are familiar and intimate to users. When they are dismantled and left on the ground, their form, structure and position change — they become strange like props.

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My work is related to functional space. I think we are missing a large part of the experience in functional architecture nowadays. My perception of what was in the rooms was skewed, I could only experience and recognise the surface of what I could reach, and my perception of the interior space of these interior structures was almost exclusively from my previous knowledge I had. I think staying in a functional space leaves a massive gap in my experience of the space, where my inherent knowledge and need to use it narrows my senses and I turn this functional space into a tool and a large part of my perception and experience of the space is missing.

I started to think about what is architecture? In his book IMMATERIAL architecture, Jonathan Hill says: "The word architecture has several meanings. For example, it is a subject, practice and a certain type of object and space, typically the building and the city... I consider. each of these definitions but focus on another: architecture is a certain type of object and space used. Within the term 'use' I include the full range of ways in which buildings and cities are experienced, such as habit, distraction, and appropriateness. In another research, the ancient European architecture had no space-energy distinction and basically the function of each room was indeterminate. Modern architecture, on the other hand, has a very fixed functionality。

The sum of all the material and experientially missing parts of my experience is the real sense of my home, not the floor plan of the house.

My VR work is inspired by Kafka's novel. As the beetle crawls around the room, its feelings are fragmented, closed. I think it's really like my daily visual experience in a narrow apartment.

I made an apartment that is not a combination of all of the furniture and frames, but an apartment that I can experience. I try to cut off the knowledge experience generated by the objective things and let the apartment present itself as a first impression. 

We first have a perception of the whole world, and then in this perception we distinguish between different concrete objects. This is contrary to our usual perception that we know each object first and then know the whole world by adding them together.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argued that subject and object are not separate entities but are reciprocally intertwined and interdependent: 'the thing is inseparable from a person perceiving it, and can never be actually in itself because it stands at the other end of our gaze or at the terminus of a sensory exploration which invests it with humanity." The perceiving subject and the perceived object are therefore considered as 'two systems ... applied upon one another, as the two halves of an orange': The second key Merleau-Ponty claim is that perception is not simply a question of vision but involves The inter-relationship between myself and the world is a matter of embodied perception because what I perceive is necessarily dependent on my being at anyone moment physically present in a matrix of circumstances that determine how and what it is that I perceive: 'I do not see [space] according to its exterior envelope; After all, the world is all around me, not in front of me.'