Points International Residency Exhibition II: Leading a Life of Idle Pleasure
Leading a Life of Idle Pleasure is intended to be a way of making a living without paying attention to the way of solving the problem of earning a living through the means of labor production.
However, in different contexts, its orientation is mixed – on the one hand, agricultural workers in the Spring and Autumn Period were civilians, and the scholars Leading a Life of Idle, which is similar to ancient Greek nobles, though they were well-read; on another lazy hand, Leading a Life of Idle can mean that people are not diligent, and grain is not divided.
The two artists who participated in the exhibition, Javier González Pesce and Yi Lian, are neither the former nor the latter. They rely on the mechanism of the residency project to obtain the time and space to Leading a Life of Idle, which is often different from the daily working mode, so as to further explore the creative order of the individual.
Javier González Pesce Satellites and Wanderers
Javier González Pesce's work combines personal ideas, situations, and objects into artistic narratives and systematically uses them to occupy a specific space.
During his stay, he described such a situation: "When I lie flat in the center of the space, mosquitoes carry my own blood around their bodies, or are mixed with the blood of this insect. My body and mosquitoes are a fragile and imperfect solar system model.”
He described it as a fictional sculpture, and this fictional sculpture did become a guiding support in the exhibition — indicating that his creative order was the core of the artist’s body, and the external “collaborators” work together to create the creation and leave it uncontrollable.
Yi Lian The Blank Filler
Yi Lian's creative approach differs from Pesce. He is more inclined to be a situational producer, to leave the subject or other creatures in the situation to react, and then to create a sense of alienation, strangeness, an imagination outside daily life.
In residency at Jinxi, there is a place similar to Yi Lian's hometown, water with which he is familiar. He invited outsiders and locals to enter the waters, which is different from previous creations — the text becomes a very important element. Yi Lian will tell a story and dialogue on the water, extract it into text, and run this through the beginning and end of this creation.
Artist residency projects often occur in venues with different situations, facilities with different conditions, and shifting institutional reputations, but all roads lead to Rome in that all residencies create time and space for artists to create.
Especially at the moment when it is difficult to get to time to be Leading a Life of Idle, the residency provides an artist with practical and effective supplements outside the studio, exhibition, and gallery. At the end of this period, we will present in parallel the interactive content of the two artists in a number of spaces at Points Center for Contemporary Art.