Shiting Zheng

In Yi-Fu Tuan’ s book Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values, he suggests that Topophilia is ‘the affective bond between people and place or setting’. The project Ground comes from my strong sense of a stadium as a place.

The project Ground is a mixed-media installation that includes text, video, sound and a site-adaptive landscape. Based on the experiments of transmutative qualities of matter, it combines personal imagination of the afterlife with beliefs and practices in Chinese culture relating to death. Both the metaphysics of death and burial, as well as their ecological elements, are considered in the work. Especially in urban areas, the allocation of burial space and the limitations of the conventional disposal methods for bodies also reflect the imposition of the patterns of human life on land.

The video, What is destructive and what is productive, shows images of different labour processes in the form of ‘dialogue’, including a series of events: stacking, burning, sieving, touching, scattering ashes, firming down the soil and washing. Each material used is transformed, in the process of ‘hybridisation’, in order to challenge and confront both the shapes and the meanings of the resulting works. The repeated events presented in a non-linear progression seem to have no beginning nor end - “nothing, if not a certain consciousness of time and the ‘beauty’ of its irremediable loss.”

The ground receives death and transforms it - through the miracles of decomposition and re-composition in increasing complexity - into the conditions for new life.

A 30-metre-deep greenhouse cave at the stadium could house the seven or eight plates of the pitch, which would be removed in just a few minutes. In this work, the carefully cultivated grass, with ashes, is packaged as a commercial product and placed in this enclosed space, restricting access to all but specific ticket-holders. The relation between commodities supplants a personal relationship to the place.

‘Pieces of Ground’ are layered and overlaid according to different surfaces and textures, which provide a base for the grass. These vibrant materials have a constantly changing materiality - achieved by using agar and water mixed with soil, ashes, glycerin, charcoal and other residues from burning - combining the ingredients, and transmuting them into new forms of existence. The process of making these pieces is considered as homespun alchemy. The alchemy of cooking soon evolves into the ecology of recycling. Positive alchemical changes occur where the discarded residues are transmuted into something filled with ‘hope and fantasy’.

This series of work is trying to investigate the visual aspect of map reading, including the question of how the visual codes make the map a highly effective subject for manipulation.

ROAD, RD, STREET, ST, AVENUE, AV: Like other graphic variables, the text suffix chosen could be designed variably by shape, size, typeface, angle, etc. Without the names of roads, avenues and streets, the map seems to lose its identifiability, while the individuality and uniqueness of each letter emerges.

Fragmentary Grid: When the grid becomes fragmental, the grid emerges. Grid lines are no longer continuous and infinite. However, unlike map symbols, the grid is not a representation of any specific reality in the physical space.

‘Eye Chart’: Imitating the visual form of an ‘eye chart’ to present changes in map scale and the selection of information, which would become a paradox. The size of the images, or rather, the scale of maps, continues to change, but the size of the letters remains the same.