Yanfei Chen
Self-discovery and Interior space
By Yanfei Chen 2018
My contextual practice research is conducted involving people who are living in the interior space to do self-discovery. We spend time in places and spaces, but we always focus on time and ignore where we are, and we cannot clearly identify ourselves and our social relationships living in space. How do we handle the relationship between people and space, the relationship between human and self, and find the space of people who lives in the realistic society? I tried to move as far as possible to do self-discovery in various spaces through the timeline. “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality (1908). There are different kinds of stories happening in the space, space is a multiple dimension concept, however, in time, events happen one after another.
As early as the Dutch school of painting, especially in Johannes Vermmer’s painting, he used to describe people’s normal life in his works, and always gazed at a corner of a room to depict people’s life senses and emotions.
After Vermmer, the painter William Hammershoi in Copenhagen put emotion into the space of description in his lifetime. He depicted a great number of rooms as well as some normal objects in his home, such as piano, chair, vase, and a woman who always presented a back to audience. The audience always feel peaceful and mysterious colors in his painting rather than other grand narratives, and his works makes the audience think about our daily life. It does turn the focus on the widespread expectation of the period that a picture is supposed to tell a story. He painted the same types of subjects as the contemporary genre painters, but removed all the layers of meaning that referred directly to external reality and contemporary life, and consistently omitted all elements of narrative. In other words, he painted genre pictures without any real genre content. The picture in question might be about loneliness and isolation.
Figure1. interior 1899
I intendto introduce quotidian elements of art into my area of interest and create a simple visual and interpretive representation of my subject, thusplanning a process of finding myself in space.
According to Alicja Kwade’s sculptural installations, objects and films illustrate or attempt to give material from abstract philosophical questions and scientific principles. Handlingthe relationship between reality and illusion, they remind us to contemplate who we are and where we are.
Fig.1. Installation view of Alicja Kwade's WeltenLinie, 2017 at Space Shifters, Hayward Gallery 2018. Photo: Mark Blower
Following this line of enquiry, I have studied Michel Foucault’s idea about the space, he created the new idea of “heterotopia”, which is different from utopie”. Apparently, “heterotopia” is inexistent, while “utopia” is real. Foucault stated that what he called the contemporary concept of space is to continue the task of “de-sacification” left by Galileo in space, rather than to eliminate the prejudice of God's creation of the world, but other spatial prejudices, such as stubborn persistence, and the opposition between private space and public space, family space and social space, cultural space and practical space, leisure space and work space. Contemporary people do not live in a single type of space (Focault refers to such a space as “empty” or without content, like an empty box), but are not necessarily limited to the boundaries of the opposite space, and various different nature spaces. Foucault mentioned the space of imagination, the space of feeling, the space of dreams, and the space of enthusiasm, all of which are like concealed or obscure spaces, rugged spaces, crowded and clogged spaces. These are just Foucault's words. He believes that there is external space, in which we live. “In this space, there are the erosion of our lives, our times, and our history, this space that chews us is also a space of a different territory. In other words, we do not live in some empty box, then add some individual things into it, so that the empty box is dyed in different colors. The space we live in is a total relationship, the relationship between different positions is irrevocable and cannot be conventional.”（1954-1988）
However, how to know yourself and reflect on yourself is the core problem in my investigation. Then find yourself eventually. Socrates said “know yourself”, which means reexamine yourself , This is to answer from another Socratic maxim: “Unexamined life is not worth it.” So Socrates believes that to know yourself, you must first examine yourself. Gaugin created the work called “Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?”
Fig.2. where we come from 1068*387
It can also be said that Gaugin found his “utopia” in Tahiti. He was living in this islet, which was real, and he was living in his space to think about the true meaning of life.
My current practice focuses on the general concepts of people who are living in the inter space, more precisely in the space, to evoke people to rethink about ourselves in different timelines, and then to review ourselves. In space, we can separate the space in our normal life, in other words, the everyday space that we seem to be familiar with can be divided into intervals, that is, there are different "exotic", one after another, individual occasions. There is some kind of conflicting space, and in the place or space where we see them, it has both duality of myth and reality.
In pre-modern societies, space and time largely coincided with each other, we must not only recognize the change of time but also, in consequence, rethink the unity of space and time in different terms, I try to move along the timeline registering as impartial as I can to record what I have found. At the same time, I will try to discover the real world by my personal experiences through any spaces, take time as a clue, put individual into the space, to ponder over who we are and where we are.
bibliography
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Problems of Space and Time (New York, Macmillan,1964,p.297)
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Michel Foucault, Dits et ecrits （1954-1988,Gallimard,p.754-755）
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Figure1 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/vilhelm-hammershoi-1245
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3.figure2 https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/weltenlinie-2017-alicja-kwade
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figure3 http://www.gauguin.org/where-do-we-come-from-what-are-we.jsp