First published on ArtSlant.
Text by Robin Peckham.
Butterfrog: New Works by Wu Shanzhuan
29 May – 23 June
Hanart TZ Gallery
202 Henley Bldg., 5 Queen’s Rd. Central, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
The work of fabled conceptual artist Wu Shanzhuan has always navigated a mass of visual and linguistic material containing everything from the explicitly political to the accidentally poetic, at times authoring whole novels based on this pursuit of meaning in the universe of signs and symbols. In this exhibition, he concentrates on a single totemic representational form, the “butterfrog,” a conceptual member of the animal kingdom he invented in collaboration with Inga Svala Thorsdottier some two decades ago. One end of the darkened gallery space contains a projected (and chronologically accurate) clock face diagramming the animal–essentially the body of a frog with the wings of a butterfly–on a textual matrix including terms often recurring in the artist’s practice, including “belief,” “instinct,” dictatorship,” “chaos,” and “reason.” On the adjoining wall hang three lightboxes–one each of blue, red, and orange–constructed of a single perforated black sheet over a grid of LEDs. The shape of the butterfrog is repeated across each frame, consisting of traced lines between holes of various sizes as if they were constellations in the night sky. Each butterfrog consists of some eighty points, each of which is labelled with both a number (in the form of either degrees or minutes and seconds, typically evenly spaced and all lying around the number 23) and a single term. These terms, in English and Chinese, appear to be popular keywords from the Chinese internet, many profane or referring to scandals or other items in the news.
There is something of an aura of the primordial enigma to these pieces, but at its simplest these pieces utilize the body of an imagined life-form to trace nonlinear narratives of collective consciousness. This project in and of itself is compelling, especially as it resists offering too strict an interpretation of its own work within the exhibition proper, allowing the verbal detritus of sublimated technological desire to manifest itself as a fantasy that, like any constellation, exists only when it is traced in the imagination of a properly positioned external observer. Key here is the concept of simultaneity, defined by the equivalent markings on each of the three lightboxes: the conceptual interest at stake lies in the possible existence of multiple interpretations, or multiple paths through the ambiguous territory of unending data.