Shen Xin at Swiss Institute
The namesake centerpiece of the Chengdu, China–born Shen Xin’s solo exhibition right here, ས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (The Earth Turned Inexperienced), 2022, is an enormous three-channel video and sound set up. The work, which grew out of the artist’s stumbles in studying Tibetan, contains a floor-to-ceiling display screen that includes imagery projected on each side, subtitled in English and Tibetan. This floor divides the gallery area evenly in two, metaphorically producing the “gulf” that often exists between totally different languages. For the piece, Shen labored with a technician to create a lighting scheme that mimicked the passage of a day inside every of the 4 seasons. The artist wrote down their emotions in response to the scheme in Mandarin, after which had this textual content translated by Ji Ta Zong, their language trainer, into Tibetan. The ensuing doc functioned as a pedagogical instrument for Shen’s language classes with the tutor.
Within the movies, hazy blobs of colour intermingle to supply a sort of summary grammar—harking back to Mark Rothko’s formalism—suggesting that studying is lots like calibrating one’s imaginative and prescient. A soundtrack of conversations between Shen and Ji, in each Tibetan and Mandarin, accompanies the piece, however what they are saying is tough to make out. This garbledness appears to emulate what it feels prefer to attempt to grasp a brand new language as one tries to beat the assorted roadblocks—mental, cultural, and so on.—that crop up throughout the course of.
In discussing the notion of “linguistic identities,” Peter Hessler, an American journalist and the writer of a number of books on China and Egypt, writes that “the extra languages , the extra you respect how onerous it’s to label one other individual, as a result of every thoughts accommodates its personal distinctive assortment of phrases.” Of their piece, Shen nods to Hessler’s idea, because the work means that possessing a way of openness or vulnerability when going through the unknown—a language, a tradition, and so on.—would possibly mitigate prejudice and result in deeper self-reflection.
As an example, when Ji describes fruits as blocky varieties on a tree, Shen is stunned; when Shen wonders why the basis of the phrase evening in Tibetan is expounded to motherhood, Ji confesses that she had by no means thought of it on this approach. By way of their brave acts of not figuring out, the duo manages to share in one another’s creativity and creativeness, producing a state of profound mutual understanding between trainer and scholar. Certainly, by “utilizing what we see and really feel as a subject of data manufacturing,” Shen states, “coexisting with multitude is possible.”
— Qianfan Gu
