Dai Chenlian: the Self-Dissection of a Sparrow

                                                                                                                                                                             Gu Zhenqing

        In contemporary art practice, is the artist the experimenter, or the subject of the experiment?

     Acquisition and training in Western modern and contemporary art are universal self-practices among young Chinese artists. The logical power of rigid quantitative analysis in Western culture has established modern art as a rigorous academic system and woven contemporary art into a vast, boundless social network. One hundred years ago, the discourse was ruled by Western ethnocentrism, and one hundred years later, it has been split up and shared by countless latecomer countries. Now things have really changed. With the internet and globalization, mankind has grown more open, diverse, connected and autonomous, and the world has grown flatter, ushering in more equal forms of international cultural exchange. Dai Chenlian uses every path available to explore and practice variations in methodology and formalism with his rigorous technical rationalism. He patiently feels his way through every gradient of the Western cultural system in search of spiritual fulcrums he can connect to. Wherever there is the slightest gap or space, he wants to squeeze through and erect a world of self-innovation that can be rooted in history and the system. What his repeated experiments and eliminations verify is not a pathway for the spiritual reconstruction of culture, but a true export passage for culture.

       Dai Chenlian’s bravery is often put to use to conquer his own self, engaging, in the contemporary art context, in killing the Buddha when you meet the Buddha, killing the self when you meet the self, pursuing a new runway for escape from the three realms of the universe. In his artworks and on the site of his performances, what Dai clears up is not objective common sense and norms but subjective concepts and value judgments. He constantly opens up his own interiority, exposing all of the paths and bridges that he has swallowed up or ruminated on, and examining all of the spiritual structures that he has digested or has yet to digest. Dai Chenlian is not only skilled at dissecting sparrows, he is also skilled at turning himself into a sparrow for self-dissection. His progression along this unique system that is art is actually the artist’s progression of self-knowledge and self-examination through self-dissection and analysis. Dai Chenlian’s self-dissection, however, is not total spiritual suicide. His scalpel can penetrate all of his own avatars, but it cannot cut into his true, free self. There is one deep-rooted membrane through which his cold self-criticism cannot pass, and it consists of the literati sensibility and shaman’s spirit that survive in his bones. Perhaps this membrane is the true driver of the extension and progression of his artistic life.