White/black horses go through the gap - run, or not

Text｜LIU Jiamin

The artist stretches out his hand and pulls the white figure, which reflects the day and day, through the hole in front of him. "This end" is a space created by magic in the artist's world.

A word related to horses and time is "white horses passing through the gaps": time is like a horse's white shadow rushing through the gap in front of us, passing by in a flash; this is about the shortness of time, full of impermanence that cannot be captured . However, when you walk into Zhang Junyi's "Yiri Racecourse", you will find that the horses in this racecourse are all shadows (almost). Therefore, compared to the metaphor of a white horse passing through a gap, Yiri Racecourse is more like a reflection: here, no matter how short a time is, it will be captured by the artist, and even shifted, fixed, and repeated unconsciously. In "Carrosol, ±1", the merry-go-round turned into a shadow - here is a trick, it looks like a merry-go-round, but in fact, two of them were taken in half and displayed in pairs; The left and right horse shadows that seem to rotate at the same speed and in the same direction will gradually fall off each other in a continuous loop (although this falling off is not obvious) - the temporality of the merry-go-round, a homogeneous cycle is quietly hidden by the artist move. She added and subtracted 1% to the left and right circulation rates, creating a world that continued to rotate together despite the deceleration of each other, with seemingly harmonious but gradually unbalanced rotations. I wasn't sure if I should feel uneasy standing in that spin that was slowly decelerating from each other. After all, isn't the merry-go-round the safest ride out there because of its predictable, harmless, constant spin? However, at the Yiri Racecourse, this homogeneous and constant speed was dismantled by the artist and turned into a trick of time.

I asked Zhang Junyi, "Why are the horses here all black?" I found myself asking a question that looked like Alice asked after she fell down a rabbit hole—a bit of a laugh, and I'm afraid there's no right answer. Black is a bottomless space compression. It is a depth that lacks depth, but it can also be a bottomless depth; therefore, it can be both a shadow and an entity. This duality is also turned into the rules of the game by the artist, going back and forth between the next two sets of offline/online works: the frame of "Mybridge's Horse" painted on the wall and the online work "Rotation", and the horizontal The Trojan Horse on the wall and the online work Shake. The former transformed the sequence photography work "The Horse in Motion" by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge into a carousel (ie, the online work "Rotation"), and then moved the The carousel is flattened into a two-dimensional wall painting; the latter is a real wooden rocking chair in the Toy Museum—of course they were originally colored—first turned into the shadow in the online work "Shake" (you click on Any colored wooden horse rocking chair will turn into a flat black shadow and rock back and forth); then this shadow will appear in the real exhibition hall and become a three-dimensional woodcut sculpture. Such a back and forth between online and offline creates a certain kind of gameplay: between material conversion and space compression and expansion, time seems to stand still, while the black horse shadow goes back and forth between two-dimensional and three-dimensional, deforming and playing. (After leaving the exhibition, I learned that Muybridge was the one who invented the "Zoopraxiscope" (moving image projector) -- the scientific device that fascinated me as a child kept thinking of during the exhibition process: from a small hole. Looking in, there is only a glowing grid projected in the dull box. As long as you turn a handle to rotate the inside of the device laterally, you can make the action of one person riding a horse in a sequence of grids. Visually Continue into a dynamic figure running.)

The next work in the exhibition hall, "Marquee", in which a horse sprints forever and repeatedly on a fixed track, may be my favorite corner of the racecourse. It seems to silently enunciate some kind of philosophy of life. Across the L-shaped right-angle wall, on the dazzling track formed by small LEDs, a horse ran from that wall, crossed the right angle of the wall, entered the other wall and accelerated and sprinted. The artist said, "This is a horse that was left alone because he ran too fast, or too slow. On this track, he sprinted toward the finish at increasing speed." Blank: We don't know if it's running too fast or too slow (and then we think: does it matter?), on this extracted track, we can't see the finish line (makes one wonder : Is there really a finish?); the only thing for sure is that it's single, it's really the only horse on the track, and it's just running the same stretch of track over and over. Isn't this very Xerxessian? The sad song of the giant who pushes the boulder up the mountain day after day, but never reaches the top of the mountain.

This cyclical temporality seems to be settled in the last work. "Code" occupies the only black area in the all-white exhibition space, and the horses show their original shape - a string of colorful code as a physical program horse, where there is no code, the program horse will follow Eliminate the shape; when the code appears, the program horses graze freely and wiggle their tails, as if resting in a kennel. At this point, we finally understand the tricks in the "Yiri Racecourse": if the white horses have passed the gap, then the Yiri Racecourse may be that the artist stretched out his hand and took the white figure of the horse, which is reflected in the sun in the sun, from the hole in front of him. From the middle, I came to "this end", a space created by magic in the artist's world. Day and day remain on the other side of the pore, and the temporality it advances has no effect here. In the artist's horse farm, in the temporality that is almost kneaded by the artist, the horse experiences fixation, repetition, circulation, even forming, deforming, and disappearing in the artist's hands; Shit, repeated beats, sometimes falling off here, sometimes stopping there.

Following the program horse in the last piece of work in the offline space, it is a matter of course to connect the works online from the offline exhibition venue - the other side of Yiri Racecourse is this world composed of codes in the computer . There, online virtual works and offline physical works correspond to each other, which is a one-to-one correspondence. For example, the online work corresponding to "Code" is "Standing": a program horse with code as its flesh, as long as you move your finger and click, it will change its action. For another example, the online work corresponding to "Marquee" is "Running": a horse runs in front of your eyes, and as long as you tap the screen with your finger, the horse will run at different speeds. To me, this is a complete parody of "white horses". Without the white light of the day and day, in the world of code, you only need to move your fingers and let the racing horse in front of you sprint. (Although, we still don't know where the end point is.) This correspondence reminds me of the inconsistency of the first "Caro Sol, ±1", where the correspondences are presented together, and the harmony is gradually unbalanced. But I've come to realize that that dissonance doesn't bother me; it may be like two horses running back to back, or I prefer to think so - a horse with its own reflection, which may end up being meet somewhere.

A horse's sprint doesn't (and doesn't) end the race, how much like creation, or life. Walking in the "Yiri Racecourse" that Zhang Junyi has been preparing for a year, I feel that watching her previous work "Carrosol" is just like yesterday's event: in the circular darkroom, various images of colorful merry-go-rounds are displayed. There was no one in the image, and the Trojan horses continued to rotate without end. Only this time, in the empty racecourse, all the horses found their way, in one way or another, in spite of their repeated postures. (Like the movements that the titles of the online works refer to: spinning, shaking, running and standing.)

I thought to myself: no matter what is going on at the other end of the day, here we can follow the artist, spinning, shaking, running, or standing between these subtle shifts that are almost imperceptible. Like (my favorite) Marquee, the "horse that could be left alone because it ran too fast, or because it ran too slow" -- it doesn't matter if it has a finish or not, at least, We can all (and only) keep running on our own tracks (or not).

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Yiri Racecourse - Zhang Junyi Solo Exhibition

2021.12.23~2022.1.23

Offline Racecourse｜Yiri Art Project 1F (No. 1, Lane 86, Xinming Road, Neihu District, Taipei City)

Online Racecourse｜chunyichang.com/yirihorsefarm