Xingyi Hu: “Unidentified” | Apr 23 – May 10, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, April 23, 2015
Hu Xing Yi extends his work from paintings to three-dimensional mediums and spaces. In Identity Eliminating System, he continues to discuss human character and individuality, or the lack of them in the current social environment. Some of the pieces in the exhibition include face casts of people from all walks of life. These faces fill up all sorts of rice bowls and take-out boxes. Other pieces are large casted iron woks with vaguely painted faces inside, and birdcages with live birds pecking bread made from the casts of the artist’s own face. Dreams, once we had, are now being rapidly consumed by realities. And our identities are being consumed by our living. Our identities are voluntarily or involuntarily switched, eliminated, or reconstituted. The results are frustrations – conscience is consumed by materialism and human characters are canceled by desires. In the work, faces have been copied and reproduced again and again, and become distorted from reality, as if our identities had been slowly lost and obscured. What this work subliminally reveals is a poetic aesthetics and social and humanistic connotation. Through his art, the artist explores and contemplates his own being and his role in a social group, and the responsibilities such a role bears.
In this installation, the live birds peck and eat the breads made from the artist’s face casts. Its symbolism expresses the helplessness in the current social and cultural environment where idealism, human nature, and individuality are being put under house arrest, consumed, and eliminated. In this helplessness, people can only immerse themselves in the vicious circle of senseless and excessive acts of being consuming and consumed. People of different identities are lost in the entrapment of their own dreams. The rice bowls and take-out boxes in the exhibition are also full of cultural significance and specific symbolism. Some of the faces held inside the bowls and boxes are without expressions, some are soulless and some are contorted and distorted, as if they were the malformed creatures produced by the modernization of a specific social setting and by the pressing from a collective consciousness. The expressionistic paintings and as well as the installation objects that remind the kind of philosophical significance in Joseph Beuys’ works, present to us many layers of meanings and the tension of thoughts, and at the same time spark introspection and self-examination.
