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image
2023 ““””

airquotes airquotes airquotes airquotes

2023 Stopology

hand and traffic light

↑ To Your Order

flying anchor

↑ Birthday

bike brake

↑ In My Wheel

2023 Cyropaedia II.1.4-6

2023 /lɒk/

lockpicking

2022 Doubting Tommy

a young man touching a broken screen

a monitor on the ground showing a young man touching a broken screen

On Tuesday night, October 25th, 2022, I walked into the room where Tianjiao installed her works for our weekly critique session. I was the first visitor, which might be the reason for us to have a backstage conversation before the official viewing. There were several objects in the room and I was not paying attention to any particular one. Tianjiao pointed to a Samsung monitor on the ground and told me that she borrowed it from the media center and intended to screen some video on it, but it turned out to be broken. Then she thought maybe she could claim that that broken monitor—I remembered that Hito Steyerl—who was liked by Tianjiao—had this monitor-breaking work STRIKE—was a work of hers to somehow trick people. But she was not so sure about this idea. She turned the monitor on, and people came. She gave a speech to clarify what were the works to be viewed but she somehow skipped the broken monitor situation. Most people were gathering around and looking at objects that had clear designations. But I noticed there were two or three people around that broken monitor and Tommy was kneeling on the ground and touching that broken monitor with his index finger. I approached him and tried to stop him from doing that because I had got an electric shock from touching a broken screen before. “I don’t believe this.” Tommy said. I was confused. I first thought Tommy was saying he did not believe that “touching a broken screen will give you electric shock.” Then I realized Tommy was saying he did not believe that the monitor was in fact broken—the broken screen could be an image of a broken screen. I was shocked, not by electricity, but by my credulousness in the first place. And then I realized that the image of Tommy the Korean young man in front of me looked very much like the doubting Thomas. And then I also realized that the name “Tommy” was “Thomas” made cute.
2022 “The essence of criticism is attention.”

watch watcher

watch watcher

watch watcher

quote

2021 fruit

2020 Jirachi

2019 Girl's Geist

a video on a chair with chairs for the audience

2020 Mother's Techne

My attempt at responding to Covid-19 as well as the only thing so far I have made for my mom.
2018 Fire and Flood in print | on web
2018 Naive Cloud

man speaking of if a bad promise should be kept

A heavily contextual work which happened during a performance class. In that class we would perform every two weeks based on a prompt. One day I told the class that after working on a project I realized that it was a better fit for the next prompt. So I initiated a vote for the class to decide "whether I am allowed to show that project two weeks later" and claimed that "if I am not allowed then I will do that now. But if I am allowed then I promise that I will perform it two weeks later". I distributed some blank pieces of paper for voting and told people to put their votes on the ground in the middle of us. After the vote count (only two said no to my plea), dear Prof. Werner Herterich, who might be too friendly to make people aware of his factual authoritative professorship, showed us his unsubmitted vote which I unforgivably had not noticed, and asked me what was the "constitutional base" of this vote. A not-so-young man who had stayed at an art school in the US for around six months and could hardly speak fluent English was completely petrified. I simply had never really thought about vote or rather, democracy, in my life before. Werner then initiated his vote for us to decide "if students have the right to determine what happens in the class room" and only two (including me) voted for "no". Werner brought up the regular critique session and I denied my vote as an object of critique for it was not a "work" (it is very funny because no matter how unthoughtful I was back then I unconsciously executed my current aesthetic standard). Nevertheless people talked about vote and democracy and I just paranoically emphasized that I was a simple man, what I had said was real, and I would perform the promised project in two weeks. But, after regaining my consciousness, I just found to keep my words was impossible because the promised project became nonsense (I was not post-modern enough to embrace nonsense) after Werner's intervention (for I designed two possibilities based on the expected binary outcome of the vote for the project which would turn into some meta- or self-referential narrative I was very fond of then). I broke my promise two weeks later and asked a question to the class through a slide presentation: If the content of a promise is a mistake, should the promise be kept? I was indeed surprised by it when I was clearing my hard drive because, despite its messy form, those problems it provoked are deep and difficult which are very much what I am working on nowadays and I would have forgotten that they have such a ridiculous archetype. I felt nervous: have I made any real progress (such a modern[ist] idea) since then? My simple imagination of democracy was really hilarious and almost ironic which means symptomatic. The problem of promise was taken up again in Jirachi and the two keywords in that question — promise and mistake — point to revelation and knowledge respectively. Anyway, I would like to express my thanks to Werner for this lesson and the promised project was called Cloud (which was not intended to echo with the play of Aristophanes [who indeed cares about democracy a lot]) of which the content I completely forget though I know it is surely bad.
2017 substitution

the right hand of a man moving the second hand of a clock

I manually run a clock for a period of time. The image here is the second enactment of it. The first version has a rather dramatic opening (hammering the glass surface in order to reach the second hand of the clock) which is not documented.
2016 ontheground

man running with a speaker

I run (or at least tried to run) on the ground under which runs the train carrying a cumbersome speaker playing the sound of a train. My friend Tianhui puts an unusual emphasis on it, which is the reason I am still showing it.
text
2022 The Visuality in Xenophon's Memorabilia pdf | An attempt on making a distinction between "good" and "beautiful" by defining the latter as "looking good" in the context of Xenophon's Memorabilia and other Socrates writings. I wonder to what extent our contemporary conceptual artists are some kind of equivalent of Socrates who is very fond of speech. A term paper for Prof. Nathan Tarcov's "Xenophon's Socrates" seminar in 2022 fall.
2022 On the Boasting Character of Wilson Yerxa's Drawing pdf | My review of Wilson Yerxa's basketball drawing. This writing is originally an appendix of On the Dualism or the Two Ingredients of the Divine. And after a post-reading discussion with Wilson, his "intention" appeared to me much more candid while at the same time further complicated the relationship between intention and its execution regarding art making and even beyond that. At least one more text on the paradox between diligence and greed with an eye on literalism (in a similar sense when Michael Fried used this word to address minimalism) is necessary.
2022 On the Dualism or the Two Ingredients of the Divine pdf | A writing structured by two concepts: beauty (which is not elaborated enough here for my own inability and inexperience) and helpfulness (which is surprisingly close to the philosophy of action which is new to me) as parts of the idea of the divine based on the reading of Aristophanes' Peace and Wealth and Leo Strauss' Socrates and Aristophanes. A term paper for Prof. Heinrich Meier's class "Philosophy and Comedy" in 2022 spring.
2021 Compare Two Educations in Cyropaedia pdf | A writing starts with my interest in the erotic incident — the happening around Panthea — in Cyropaedia but ends with a rather unexpected discovery of different modes of desire and their incarnations manifested through three characters (Araspas, Cyrus and Tigranes) connected somehow by two parallel educations. A term paper for Prof. Nathan Tarcov's "Xenophon's Education of Cyrus" seminar in 2021 fall.

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note

"Give ear then, as they say, to a right fine story, which you will regard as a mythos (μῦθος), I fancy, but I as a logos (λόγος): for what I am about to tell you I mean to offer as the truth." (Plato, Gorgias, 523a.) Socrates ended up his argument with Callicles, who clearly was not persuaded by Socrates' reasoning, with this sentence and starts from there a story he made up. In the book on rhetoric, the very rhetorical power of this transiting statement is unignorable. And the pair of concepts — mythos and logos — are more proper than image and text used above in their conventional senses to roughly categorize my works.

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about

My name is Qiuchen Wu. I was born in Shanghai, and live in Chicago now. This is my website and I hope you like it. Write me letters :)