materials: damaged shoes (found), model hands (found), tea-table glass (found), wood pillars (found), fishing lines, white tapes, yellow signal light, steel nails, sealant fix
size: variable
size: variable
In July 2019, a friend called me asking if I was interested in working out something at a warehouse of a leather shoe brand (Echiza). The warehouse has suffered a flood of rainwater and almost all of their leather shoes were too damaged to be mended. Echiza was clearing the warehouse and moving to a new location nearby. This friend (Mu Jing) decided to curate a pop-up exhibition ("Vacant Lot: Locality and Status Quo") during the last three days of this warehouse, themed around those damaged shoes.
"contingent" is in a sense a continuation and variation of my previous work in 2013, "Traffic". Both were completed on in-between sites, the latter in a newly built and not yet in use building, and this one in a damaged space soon to be abandoned. While the latter created a confusingly constructive scene of mysterious happenings in a more fictional way, "contingent" continues with the unsettling image of intersections, but is more intimate with music or poetry, more ambiguous, with ambiguity itself stressed through the yellow light, disordered and wavy "zebra crossings", almost invisible lines that block one from moving fluently in this scene, and the seemingly conducting hands.
"contingent" is in a sense a continuation and variation of my previous work in 2013, "Traffic". Both were completed on in-between sites, the latter in a newly built and not yet in use building, and this one in a damaged space soon to be abandoned. While the latter created a confusingly constructive scene of mysterious happenings in a more fictional way, "contingent" continues with the unsettling image of intersections, but is more intimate with music or poetry, more ambiguous, with ambiguity itself stressed through the yellow light, disordered and wavy "zebra crossings", almost invisible lines that block one from moving fluently in this scene, and the seemingly conducting hands.