Slow Pace is a Spirit and a State
                                                                                                                                                                             Gu Zhenqing
　　　From the Industrial Revolution of Europe onward, modernism changed all kinds of traditional and geopolitical social structure and individual value all around the world without any exception. For modern peoples living in the urbanized society, their concept of time also changed fundamentally. Some key words and concepts like “timeliness”, “convenient and fast” and “time is money” also controlled the thinking mode and behaviors of modern people to a certain extent. “The sooner the better” has become a kind of success criteria which forced actors constantly push all time points closer to each other. Time becomes a kind of scarce resource of modern peoples and “slow” means loss of chance and competition. Therefore, artists’ time-consuming creation even became a kind of resistance against the commercial society operating with a high-speed and a kind of mental game with the mainstream concept of the era.
　　　Cooperating with time, the poetic concept still exist in the thoughts of some contemporary artists of China, who can calm down with a “independent in solitude” attitude to refine their weapon of thoughts without being disturbed by the external chaos. For them, “slow pace” became a kind of concept root in tradition and combining life and creation together; which is also a long artistic creation process with constant self-questioning and self-reflection. “Slow pace” looks like a kind of description of time; yet tracing back to its origin, we will find that it is actually the meditation of independent spirit and reflection of free thoughts by artists. From the recognition of “slow pace” idea, to realize it in practice, the artists are realizing the contemporary transformation of Chinese traditional aesthetic spirit. The artists have creatively applied and deconstructed the methodology of the unity of knowing and doing, following the method that “doing” is the beginning of “knowing” and “knowing” is the achievement of “doing”, to further interpret the essence of “slow pace” and its present significance in the creating practice. Slow Pace is a Spirit and a State.