Dual exhibition by Fengfeng and Shao Yixiao, curated by J.T

Imaginary Z, Hangzhou, Nov25–Dec25, 2023

Fengfeng:
In a conversation with a friend, he mentioned his ability was perception, as he could always guess others' zodiac signs correctly. When he asked me what mine was, I said it was "coincidence." Throughout my life, I've experienced many serendipitous moments—coincidences that seemed to follow me wherever I went. Over time, I've come to realize how significant these moments are to me. Recently, these occurrences have made my heart race, leaving me speechless. When I reflect on them, it feels like those moments allow me to rediscover my own existence.

My works on the heart are tied to these coincidences. I keep encoun- tering heart shapes, especially over the past two years. Once, while on a work trip with colleagues, the city was filled with heart-shaped things, but my colleagues found it strange, saying they hadn't seen any of these the previous month. Over the past two years, I've also created several heart-shaped pieces. Often, when I feel the urge to make something, it ends up taking the form of a heart. It's as if this shape resonates with me.

Hangzhou, December 25, 2023

From No. 90 Wansongling Road (Imaginary Z) to No. 137 Fengshan Road (Cusp.), carrying the "heart" with J.T 19 and Gui Kuan’s help.

At the end of 2023, I participated in exhibition projects at two art spaces in Hangzhou during the same period. On the final day of the exhibition at Imaginary Z, we carried the large heart to Cusp. 's exhibition "What type of space or community will we evolve into?" (after improvising a proposal and obtaining approval from the space), where it continued to be presented.

My original work for Cusp., titled The Body without Organs of the Exhibition (with Cusp.), was a series of re-creations using the space's backstage tools and leftover materials from the installation process, with the idea of making the "process" of the exhibition the exhibition itself. This happening of heart-carry, by a stroke of luck, also became a part of my participation in Cusp. 's exhibition project.

Solo exhibition
BA Project, Shenzhen, July04-july30, 2023

If we compare art to a language of communication, it is akin to the languages used by lions or tigers, like a resonant "ow" or "roar." If we liken it to a way of acting, it resembles moving on all fours, like cats and dogs using their bodies and organs.

Fengfeng has been engaging in an artistic practice that resists signifi- cance and subjectivity, employing readymade objects as his creative materials. In his practices, he seeks to regenerate a material substance, freeing the materials and content of objects from their entrenched system of signs and semiotics. By setting "molecular" elements into motion, the artist allows them to interact with the possible traits of landscapity, pictoriality, or musicality, thereby creating an actual multiplicity.

The "IKEA Products" series began in 2023. The iconic selling model that IKEA delivers disassembled parts to customers, along with instruction manuals that standardize their assembly, is an expression of its segmented structure, which is simultaneously the most segmented and centralized. "Butterfly" is the first piece of Fengfeng's "IKEA works. The artist mixed the components from various purchased furniture items—beds, hangers, carts, chairs, and more—and then improvised to reshape and reassemble them. This process is akin to recomposing established musical notes into a new score and improvising it.

If one approaches Fengfeng's work with a preconception of "furniture," one might initially be at a loss. When the artist reconstructs the internal structures of readymade objects in a more improvisational, intuitive, and disordered manner, the materials manifest themselves in a new territoriality and landscapity. However, Fengfeng asks, "How do you enter a thing with no significance and subjectivity? Could it be through something as abstract as "rhythm" or perhaps "topography"? Or even the elevation, density, or salinity between one part and another?

What is certain is that behind these possibilities lies a chaotic rift the artist has torn between the ordered reality and established logic. As for this bold endeavor, let us call it a "home party."

Dual exhibition by Fengfeng and Kuan Gui, curated by Zachariah Zhou
Three Shadows Photography Art Center 3.0 Space, Beijing, 09Apr–19Apr, 2022

The distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior, which are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places- machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements: “I love you”(or whatever)

The title of the exhibition, "I love you (or whatever)," comes from a passage in A Thousand Plateaus in which Deleuze and Guattari describe the concept of "Assemblage." "Assemblage" is the central antithetical subject of this exhibition.

"Assemblage" means, by definition, "many," e.g., four people are an assemblage, five mediums are an assemblage. In short, the world is a network of innumerable assemblages linked together, each with its multiplicities and its collective unconscious. The concept of assemblage, in particular, emphasizes the fact that within a series, its internal compositional relations are never stable and constant; on the contrary, each of its internal components can be replaced by the internal components of other systems. This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the nature of exogenous connections of things. In these unceasing movements and changes, assemblages interpenetrate and form a productive statement at a particular moment in time. And, all statements are the product of a mechanistic configuration of an assemblage, i.e., the agent of a collective elaboration.

"Each of us is caught up in an assemblage of this kind, and we reproduce its statements when we think we are speaking in our name; or rather we speak in our name when we produce its statement." This exhibition is a productive statement. In fact, any exhibition is a productive statement and never needs a specific subject of enunciation. In a fluid social structure, the very meaning of the exhibition is to uncover plurality and question any will with personality. The artistic practice of the two artists as a dangerous collection (human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines; molecular machines with their particles of becoming- inhuman; Oedipal apparatuses; and counter-Oedipal apparatuses, variable in aspect and functioning) adds to the logic of semantics the data feeling of the aliquid. It gets entangled in the spring of Beijing, in this space, and then deterritorializes and thus becomes, by accident, this romantic or cruel statement: I love you (or whatever).