Shiyi Sheng

Place of birth : Jinhua, Zhe Jiang Province, China

Language speak: Mandarin, French, English


Educational background ：
1990/09 —1993/07 Graduated from No.4 High School, Jinhua, Zhejiang Province,China
1996/09—2000/07 BFA, Graduated from the Normal University of Zhejiang Province,China Majored
in Pedagogy of fine art
2004/09 —2005/07 DNAP, National Diploma of Visual Art in France, Majored in Communication
2005/09 —2006/06 Candidate for last year of DNSEP, France

Achievements：

Gain a test certificate of China National Mandarin first level at second ,1999
During the college days ： Second Class scholarship for 96/97 academic year
Excellent Student Council Member of Art Schools, 1998
A number of awards for photographic works nominated for " Li Shi Bei" Movie and TV star at the Forth Shanghai Movie Festival ,1997
A Print entitled "Dream land" was chosen to show at the Fifth Exhibition of Fine Art Works by Students of the Normal University of Zhejiang ,1998
Several pieces of art works became part of the Normal university's art
Collections,2000
Excellent journalist of the university's newspaper , 1997/1998
Gain a Scholarship from Beax-Art de Marseiller en France to go to New
York to continue project about “Cross Culture”, 2005


Exhibition’s Experience:

2003/12 Three artists joint exhibition at “the N dimensional contemporary art exhibition”, Art Museum of Guangzhou Fine Art College , Guangzhou , China
2004/11 Du Grande Marché D'art Contemporaine, Paris, France
2005/04 Art exhibition with the theme " La Chine Deparque", Marseille , France
2005/06 Archaeology of the Future “the Second Triennial of Chinese Art” in Nanjing Museum of China , Nanjing, China
2005/10 Video and painting exhibition Bercy of Paris , Paris , France
2006/10 “Contemporary Chinese Visions” New York AMY SIMON Gallery, C.T, U.S.A
2006/11 Massachusetts College of Art to present Chinese film/video, Boston, U.S.A
2007/01 “Landscape showing here” Gitana Rosa Gallery, NY, U.S.A
2007/02 2007 “Lunar New Year Celebration” Solo photography exhibition in International Center of New York, NY, U.S.A
2007/07 Summer Film Screening Series II “Confessional”, NY, U.S.A
2007/08 “Echoes & Reflections’’ China Square Gallery in Chelsea , NY, U.S.A
2007/09 Video “Contemporary Collaboration”, Wanas 2007 20th Anniversary Show, Knislinge, Sweden.
2007/12 Videos show in 2007 Fountain Miami, Miami, U.S.A
2008/03 “The future was then so now what ” SCOPE " in New York Lincoln Center, NY, U.S.A
2008/07 Video "Contemporary Collaboration NO.1" Entry the Best Short Movie Nominees, screening at "Shoot Me Film Festival", Netherlands.
2008/09 Video: "The Walls Are Closing" (collaboration with Bennett Media Studio, for a fund raising event for the Wenchuan earthquake in China), at the Shimmel Center for the Performing Arts, New York, July.
2008/11 “Tibet’’ photography show at International Center of New York, NY, August.
2009-2010: Photo and Video: Cross-Cultural Couples, and Video “ DO YOU HAVE AN ALLERGY? ” exhibit “HERE + NOW” CHINESE ARTISTES IN NEW YORK in Museum of Chinese(MOCA), New York, Nov. -Jan.

2003/12 Three artists joint exhibition at “the N dimensional contemporary art exhibition”, Art Museum of Guangzhou Fine Art College , Guangzhou , China
2004/11 Du Grande Marché D'art Contemporaine, Paris, France
2005/04 Art exhibition with the theme " La Chine Deparque", Marseille , France
2005/06 Archaeology of the Future “the Second Triennial of Chinese Art” in Nanjing Museum of China , Nanjing, China
2005/10 Video and painting exhibition Bercy of Paris , Paris , France
2006/10 “Contemporary Chinese Visions” New York AMY SIMON Gallery, C.T, U.S.A
2006/11 Massachusetts College of Art to present Chinese film/video, Boston, U.S.A
2007/01 “Landscape showing here” Gitana Rosa Gallery, NY, U.S.A
2007/02 2007 “Lunar New Year Celebration” Solo photography exhibition in International Center of New York, NY, U.S.A
2007/07 Summer Film Screening Series II “Confessional”, NY, U.S.A
2007/08 “Echoes & Reflections’’ China Square Gallery in Chelsea , NY, U.S.A
2007/12 Videos show in 2007 Fountain Miami, Miami, U.S.A
2008/03 “The future was then so now what ” SCOPE " in New York Lincoln Center, NY, U.S.A

| …of the body (impressions)

The recognition of the body’s inscription into artistic practice as both subject and site is a commonplace of our modernity, and the attendant reflexive philosophical elaboration of corporeality is a perennial complement. The complicities and predations between center and periphery, inside and outside, between the places, limits and extent of bodies, is so ubiquitous, and mediated, as to be almost invisible, so much so that it is often only at the margins of this circulatory system that our corporealities are rendered visible and sensible, framed in a manner that catches our gaze, and allows us to see through the reflexes and habits of an increasingly regulated specularity1. It is in this permeable and intercessionary space that we re-cognize and re-engage the body, where the body becomes an inter(sur)face where aesthetics, ethics, and technics intersect and transpose. We are so familiar with ourselves, so secure in our embodiments, in what we presume ourselves to be, that we readily forget how strange, wonderful, and terrifying those territories are which lie just beyond the artifactuality of identity.

It is this space, what we might call the commonplace of photography and cinematography—its tacit visual habitus—that Sheng Shiyi situates her work. Here, she tampers with convention, teasing both form and reception, opening hitherto unsuspected spaces of the image. And with a beguiling simplicity she traces some of the more surprising and unexpected referential trailings in the conventional frameworks of viewing. In a recent short video piece entitled Allergie culturelle Shiyi uses a matchstick to make a ‘drawing’ on the hypersensitive skin of Chinese man. The impression of the matchstick on the surface of his skin raises a welt, marking the trajectory of the matchstick with a raised swelling. The man’s skin turns a bright red, and the tracery of lines fades after approximately three hours. This man had been told that his condition is an allergenic reaction to a foreign environment (having grown up in China, he has lived in France for almost fifteen years). Shiyi uses the subtle interplay of surfaces—of skin, the surface of a body, which is the common visual surface inscribed onto film—as an enabling metaphor to tease out relations between foreignness, memory, performance, technics and the body. In the first performance, Shiyi had drawn a “French plane tree,” which is commonly thought to have originated in France. In fact, it is a type of tree native to China that was exported, mainly to France. Shiyi then asked several other foreign students to execute a drawing, one which would be suitably representative of their home, on the man’s skin. A range of drawings from Finnish, Canadian, Japanese, Swiss, Columbian and Chinese students are accomplished o the malleable surface of the man’s back. Ranging from schematic to intimate to symbolic, all of the drawings slowly fade away. Are they absorbed? Consumed? Rejected? In a sense it is impossible—and unnecessary—to determine, since the metaphors of impression, physical, cultural, conceptual, all play out. And there are further questions, for example: what sort of surface is a body? What sort of medium, or interface can it become? Sheng Shiyi’s Allergie culturelle also references certain early works in American conceptual/ performance art, works by artists such as Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci. For example, in the early 1970s Vito Acconci was invited to the Rhode Island School of Design to ‘perform.’ During the day he met with students, critiqued work, and generally played the role of a visiting artist. As evening came and the time of the performance drew near, the gallery space filled up. Acconci wandered among the crowd, stopping and engaging people intermittently, all the while obsessively pushing the serrated edge of a bottle cap into the flesh of his hands and arms. Nothing else happened, and when people asked what he was doing with the bottle cap—he was making it fairly obvious—he replied: “I’m trying to make a good impression.” That was the ‘performance.’ The sense of it lies not in the one-line denouement, but rather in the proleptic process, the performative suspense, anticipation, and the array of subjective states—annoyance, suspicion, confusion, laughter—that were set into motion.2 In a similar work Acconci again uses the body—his own—as an impressionable surface, biting himself in order to leave a series of discrete (temporary) marks. This performance was also recorded, effectively transferring the surface bearing impressions to another ‘surface,’ the screen. Notions of screen, face, surface, interface, trace a common rhetoric of corporeality between works. Acconci’s Applications (1970, Super-8 film) is the filmed record of a live performance in which Acconci’s body is covered in imprints of bright red lipstick, applied by Kathy Dillon, who ‘smothers’ his upper body in kisses. Acconci then rubs the front of his body against Dennis Oppenheim’s back until all traces of color are transferred from his body to Oppenheim’s. In Dennis Oppenheim’s Identity Transfer [1970] a drawing by Oppenheim is inscribed onto the bare back of his son, who, tracing the tactile sensation, repeats as accurately as possible, the form of the drawing on the blank wall in front of him, a subtle commentary on notions of translation, transfer, traversal—of place, sense, generation, meaning, etc.3 A recent work, Identity Transfer (after Dennis Oppenheim) by Eduardo Villanes, performs a related a 'conceptual' transfer of identity, from the printed image to the TV image, oven the skin of the author, as a way of showing impunity over a case of human rights in Peru.4 There is, between an often unlikely constellation of works, an echo, a trace that crosses, and so makes salient, a common territory of representation, indeed, a problematics of representation. Sheng Shiyi’s works employ this echo-like structuring to circumscribe her own questions of place and displacement, identity and difference, setting them to work within a framework which is simultaneously intimate and public.

|| méconaissance… (expressions)

Many of the contemporary artistic practices that situate themselves in proximity to the body address issues of identity, cognition, or the body’s normative or exceptional articulation in social and technical spheres, there are also certain artists whose explorations of alterity and corporeality introduce a disturbance— throw into question— those determinations which are taken as material or medium by others. Sheng Shiyi is one of the most interesting of a generation of younger artists who take nothing as given, even— especially—the intimacies and intricacies between self and other. In a series of video pieces related to Allergie Culturelle, Shiyi has individuals perform actions or works from a cultural tradition different—sometimes radically—from their own. In one part of this work-in-progress she has a professional Asian singer perform arias from a western opera. With consummate professionalism and style, all of the inflections are wrong—a bit off, out of registration, mis-regarded. It is a beautiful, and uncanny moment, where both an echo of the music evoked, and the presence of a miscast variant cohabit5. It is a form of punning, what in rhetoric is named paronomasia. 6 The echo returns, nonidentical to itself, and in its foreignness, recalls that which is absent. It is a poignant comment on assimilation and simulation, communication, longing and solitude. It is the quality of “being out of place” of being displaced or culturally transposed, that Sheng Shiyi is exploring with this unfinished series of ‘portraits.’ In another work, Contemporary Cooperation, perhaps the most engaging and successful piece, a culturally diverse group of people are asked to meet for dinner. When they arrive—the cuisine is asian—they are all given chop-sticks; in this case, however, the chopsticks are almost a meter long, and quite impossible to employ in a conventional manner. Shiyi’s camera simply records what takes place, as people fumble, drop, or unexpectedly launch pieces of food into the air. It is engaging and funny, watching people’s frustrations and laughter. Finally one group of people figure out something that works very well with these new chop-sticks: they begin to feed each other. It is a sweet and generous lesson in the sociology of community.

||| dispositions…(photography)

There is a curious confluence between certain words in English and in French which, depending on the context, may be used to denote either objective conditions or subjective states. The word disposition, for example, may refer to a mood, temperament, or natural inclination. An inclination may refer as easily to the physical condition of a body resting at an angle as to a propensity, a habit, or an attitude. An attitude, in addition to connoting behavior, has a precise meaning regarding the position of an objective body relative to specified directions. Attitude may also mean a posture, a settled mode of thinking or a disposition. In French, disposition means a tendency, inclination, or aptitude, and the word dispositif, which translates the English apparatus, as device or set-up, also has the connotations of a configuration, system, or plan of operation. When one speaks then, of a disposition of the body, one may refer to its material conditions or tendencies, as much as to its unconscious, subjective, or performative states. Moreover it is inordinately difficult to draw a line, to determine boundaries—or even, for that matter to trace the contours of a mediating interface—between the different aspects of embodied being.7 Here, with a remarkable prescience towards the signs and senses of embodiment—as lived being, as a contiguity or metonymic presence, as a deictic (spatio-temporal) marker, as a trace, or as an interval—Sheng Shiyi takes up issues of corporeality and photography. In her works the shadow of the body is traced and reflected, doubled and deferred, inscribed as self and other, in a relentless exploration of its apprehensions, arrestments, deferrals and excesses. In some cases the trace is quite literal, as in those works which circulate around the presence of remnants, a blur of movement on the surface, a chair recently evacuated, a hat, abandoned.

Even in this digital world we still readily accept photography’s claim to verisimilitude, that in an indexical relation to the real, the light which impinges upon bodies fixed in a momentary interval before the camera, is the very same light that records this impression upon the photo-sensitive/chemical surface in a camera. When Roland Barthes says, looking at a photograph of the youngest brother of Napoleon, “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor,” he begins a subtle interrogation of precisely this ontology.8 The photograph is an indexical sign in that it ‘points to’ that which it depicts, its representamen, and it is for this reason that Barthes claims that it is impossible to see a photograph (or, one might add, subsequent media) since one only sees what a photograph refers to;. Photography is, in this sense, invisible. At the same time it also has a substantive presence, a “likeness . . . sent out from the surfaces of things,” bearing “the look and shape of the body from which it came.” 9 Photography thus takes up residence within the framework of technical reproducibility, from Plato’s shadows to Pliny’s tracings, as an evidentiary marker, an index of bodies, things, events. It is, like those relics of a more direct nature—hair and teeth, bones and raiments—similarly stabilized, even fetishized, as a privileged mark of presence, plural, teetering on the edge between recognition and méconaissance. Sheng Shiyi’s photographs—more precisely I should call hers a photographic process, since she often does not produce fixed stabile artifacts, but hundreds of intermediary contact sheets—take place within the everydayness of images, in relation to photography’s favored conceit of a “perfect moment.” Sheng Shiyi not so much rejects, as ignores, the notion of a “perfect moment” and seeks those moments that are just about to escape the gaze, those images which, just as they are caught, defy belief, which belie themselves in their strangeness or their inconsumability. These are the most interesting images. Sometimes they too, are overlooked. It is the great merit of Sheng Shiyi that she has a certain sensitivity to their loss, a certain engagement with their foreignness, that these invisible images are preserved.

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument; and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it we have access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to the humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception of things.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty10



notes


1. I have addressed related aspects of photography, and subsequent media, in various texts. See especially: “Projection and Dis/embodiment: Toward a Genealogy of the Virtual,” in Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, ed. Chrissie Iles, [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Abrams] (2001); “Variables: Notations on Stability, Permeability, and Plurality in Media Artifacts,” pp. 201–253, in Saving the Image: Art After Film, ed. Tanya Leighton, Pavel Buchler, [Glasgow and Manchester: Center for Photography/Glasgow and Manchester Metropolitan University] (2003); “Arrestments: Corporeality and Mediation,” Thomas Zummer, in Suturas y fragmentos: Cuerpos y territories en la ciencoa-ficción/Stitch and Split: Bodies and Territories in Science Fiction, Nuria Homs, Laurence Risser, eds., Fundacion Antoni Tapies/Constant vzw, Barcelona/Brussels, 2004-05; “Seeing Double: Eleanor Antin’s Roman Allegories,” Thomas Zummer, PAJ 83 A Journal of Performance and Art, May 2006 Volume XXVII, No. 2 [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] 2006; “Inter/sur/faces: Notes on the Recent Works of Heleen Deceuninck,” Thomas Zummer, in Temporalities, exh. cat., [Bruge: Free Space] 2006

2. This story was related to the author in conversation by Alan Sondheim, who was present in the audience at the time, and a friend of Acconci’s.

3. See: Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1974 [New York: Castelli-Sonabend]; Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films, 1975 Supplement [New York: Castelli-Sonabend]; See also: Conceptual Art, Ursula Meyer, [New York: E.P. Dutton] 1972; Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, Lucy Lippard, [New York: Praeger] 1973. Among other artists who deal, in a wide variety of ways, with corporealities, include Marina Abramovics, Vanessa Beecroft, Phil Collins, Alan Sondheim, Leslie Thornton, Foof’wa d’Immobilite, Nan Goldin, Araki, etc.

4. Identity Transfer (after Dennis Oppenheim) by Eduardo Villanes, was exhibited at the Espacio Fundacion Telefonica in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico City, the Tremaine Gallery, Connecticut, and various other venues. See also works by Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy (Fresh Acconci) and Marina Abramovics (a remaking of Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed” at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia), which range from incursion and cooptation to homage.

5. The structure of the uncanny: an eruption of the unfamiliar within the familiar as the familiar. The first five entries on “uncanny” in the Oxford English Dictionary all have to do with mischief, malice, carelessness, unreliability, lack of caution or trust, difficulty or severity—and uncomfortability, especially as regards the supernatural, the strange or unfamiliar. In the psychoanalytic register the term is far more determinate, and heavily theorized, such that it is put into play with discourses on simulation, mimesis, alterity, the sublime, the abject, the alien and the aesthetic. In modern robotics an uncanny threshold is reached at the point that a simulation is believably human enough such that any subsequent disparity in that illusion produces anxiety.

6. Paronomasia is a form of punning in which words which sound very similar, but not identical, are brought into close proximity, so that by being so close in sound each invokes the other to an indeterminate degree, causing a duplicity—a fibrillation—in the space of the trope. In other words, though each term sounds very like its counterpart, it is only almost a pun, since it also underscores the difference between them. Another term for Paronomasia is Aversio, or Turne-Tale. See: Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd Edition, [Berkeley: University of California Press] 1991; See also: Michael Hawcroft, Rhetoric: Readings in French Literature, [Oxford: Oxford University Press] 1999; and Marc Fumaroli, et al, Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne, 1450–1950, [Paris: Presses universitaires de France] 1999.

7. All definitions are from the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Sheng Shiyi’s studies have taken place in Paris, France, and in New York City, USA.

8. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida; Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans., (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981/ Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980).

9. The reference here is to Lucretius, quoted in extenso:

… I show that there
Exist what we call images of things,
Which as it were peeled off from the surfaces
Of objects, fly this way and that through the air;
These same, encountering us in wakeful hours,
Terrify our minds, and also in sleep, as when
We see strange shapes and phantoms of the dead
Which often as in slumber sunk we lay
Have roused us in horror; lest perchance we think
That spirits escape from Acheron, or ghosts
Flit among the living, or that after death
Something of us remains when once the body
And mind alike together have been destroyed,
And each to its primal atoms has dissolved. . . .

I say therefore that likenesses or thin shapes
Are sent out from the surfaces of things
Which we must call as it were their films or bark
Because the image bears the look and shape
Of the body from which it came, as it floats in the air

—T. Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura

For Lucretius the body casts off impressions, excressences, like the skin of a snake, or the exquisite exoskeletal husk of a cicada, negative traces of an absent body, both substance and phantasm. It is as apt a description of our apprehensions of photography as any modern account. This translation is from: Sir Ronald Melville, ed. Lucretius On The Nature of the Universe, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)

10. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis, trans., (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968





















Biographical Information on the Author

Thomas Zummer is an independent scholar and writer, artist and curator. His drawings, media, and sculptural works have shown w

2005年第二届中国艺术三年展——未来考古学
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盛识伊目前是在法国学习艺术的中国人，她的影像作品《过敏》通过一个中国人旅居法国后全身皮肤产生的过敏反应，为当今世界各种文化在融合影响之中有可能产生的各种碰撞和误读和由此而产生的各种未知的后果的“现身说法”。我们可以称之为文化的“转基因”。新的考古学和人类学研究成果表明，亚欧大陆的两端人员往来远自史前时期就已经开始，几乎与文明社会的出现同步，而今人员的往来更促进了东西方文化的往来和交融。文化冲突与文化交融就逻辑而言是文化互动的两种结果。那个在中国生活了12年的“过敏人”，因为改变了生活环境，“水土不服”而引发过敏，这种“水土不服”是生理的和地理的，更是文化的和政治的。他的身体在未来会怎样很难说，也许会慢慢好起来，变得不再过敏了，也许会越来越严重，甚至要离开法国回到中国才会痊愈。这就像没有人怀疑文化背景的不同造成了西方价值观和中国传统价值观的对立并存、消长和融合的客观矛盾存在，随着时间的推移，正由对抗并立转入互渗融合。中国的现代化和全球一体化进程的加速，终将弥合东西方意识与观念的差别。斯塔夫理？阿诺斯说：“在这样一个活跃多变的世界里，任何地方所取得的任何创造性成就都可能成为大家共同的知识财富，人们加以讨论、学习、采用或予以抛弃。最终结果将是全球范围的相互作用和相互交融。生物学领域中杂交优势的法则在文化领域中也会起作用……”

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再来看一看完全呈现为另一种面貌的盛识伊的影像作品，我相信会产生一阵阵轻微的骚动。作为女性艺术家，盛识伊也许天生懂得给一般意义上的“美”找到一点具体化的、倾斜的、不那么合符世俗情绪的表现。和男性艺术家——例如杨勇——关注女性的情况不同，盛识伊的关注是一种内部的关注。在听她谈到对“普遍的同性恋倾向”的兴趣时，她给我的感觉是她有一种乐于将秘密公开的兴奋。事实上，“同性恋”已不是什么秘密了，作为一种被忽略的状态，也许有意思的是它那轻度的、普遍的表现。当一群男孩子走向球场，或一群女孩子相约在房间里聚会时，我们知道，什么也不会发生。的确什么也不会发生，再自然不过了，所以影像才同样是自然的。根据我对性别身份之于艺术创作的偶有兴趣的观察，我发现大多数女性艺术家的作品都是健康的、坦率的、直接的。奥吉芙也许是第一个告诉我们她在使用曲言法的女性艺术家，但是里芬斯塔尔和辛迪·舍曼却分别走向了不同的极端，前者是两面性的强力意志，后者是残酷与超验的混合。盛识伊属于第三类，即将一切正常化，同时又不剔除刻意的形式。我想，尽管有人走得远不可及，掌握了更多成功的秘诀，但盛识伊显然不需要按照“如何成为一名杰出的女性艺术家”的路线去涉足主题的敏感区域，她是从日常体验出发的，然后很自然地按下了快门。不错，当她走近这个主题的时候，她成为了一个召集人，一场戏剧的导演，并且准确地把握着仪式的进程。她也许访问过某些人？也许热中于了解秘密社团？也许仅仅是忽发奇想？不管怎么样，一个女性艺术家将目光投向她的同类，这是最自然不过的事了。男性艺术家也许天生缺少这份权力。男性的禁区事实上除了随地大小便比女性更多。男性的内心世界永远是封闭的，人们赋予这种封闭的最高境界是“深沉”。而女性呢？谈到她们的“深沉”时（在这里我们也许可以恰当地使用“深邃”）。安东尼奥尼借影片《一个女人的证明》男主人公的嘴说，她们像宇宙那样难以被了解。也就是说，女性是一种能让人产生被包围、置身于其中，然而又无法探究却始终让人想探究的深邃的世界。所以，说女性不属于现实世界也许是从另一个角度附和了安东尼奥尼的观点。女性艺术家作品中的那种清澈、毅然决然，常常是会令男性恐慌的，恐慌的理由也许是女性完全不需要绞尽脑汁就能直接抵达视觉的境界。当盛识伊读到我的这些句子时，她是否觉得仍然有一层无法清除的隔阂呢？

2003年12月4日至5日

…of the body (impressions)

The recognition of the body’s inscription into artistic practice as both subject and site is a commonplace of our modernity, and the attendant reflexive philosophical elaboration of corporeality is a perennial complement. The complicities and predations between center and periphery, inside and outside, between the places, limits and extent of bodies, is so ubiquitous, and mediated, as to be almost invisible, so much so that it is often only at the margins of this circulatory system that our corporealities are rendered visible and sensible, framed in a manner that catches our gaze, and allows us to see through the reflexes and habits of an increasingly regulated specularity1. It is in this permeable and intercessionary space that we re-cognize and re-engage the body, where the body becomes an inter(sur)face where aesthetics, ethics, and technics intersect and transpose. We are so familiar with ourselves, so secure in our embodiments, in what we presume ourselves to be, that we readily forget how strange, wonderful, and terrifying those territories are which lie just beyond the artifactuality of identity.

It is this space, what we might call the commonplace of photography and cinematography—its tacit visual habitus—that Sheng Shiyi situates her work. Here, she tampers with convention, teasing both form and reception, opening hitherto unsuspected spaces of the image. And with a beguiling simplicity she traces some of the more surprising and unexpected referential trailings in the conventional frameworks of viewing. In a recent short video piece entitled Allergie culturelle Shiyi uses a matchstick to make a ‘drawing’ on the hypersensitive skin of Chinese man. The impression of the matchstick on the surface of his skin raises a welt, marking the trajectory of the matchstick with a raised swelling. The man’s skin turns a bright red, and the tracery of lines fades after approximately three hours. This man had been told that his condition is an allergenic reaction to a foreign environment (having grown up in China, he has lived in France for almost fifteen years). Shiyi uses the subtle interplay of surfaces—of skin, the surface of a body, which is the common visual surface inscribed onto film—as an enabling metaphor to tease out relations between foreignness, memory, performance, technics and the body. In the first performance, Shiyi had drawn a “French plane tree,” which is commonly thought to have originated in France. In fact, it is a type of tree native to China that was exported, mainly to France. Shiyi then asked several other foreign students to execute a drawing, one which would be suitably representative of their home, on the man’s skin. A range of drawings from Finnish, Canadian, Japanese, Swiss, Columbian and Chinese students are accomplished o the malleable surface of the man’s back. Ranging from schematic to intimate to symbolic, all of the drawings slowly fade away. Are they absorbed? Consumed? Rejected? In a sense it is impossible—and unnecessary—to determine, since the metaphors of impression, physical, cultural, conceptual, all play out. And there are further questions, for example: what sort of surface is a body? What sort of medium, or interface can it become? Sheng Shiyi’s Allergie culturelle also references certain early works in American conceptual/ performance art, works by artists such as Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci. For example, in the early 1970s Vito Acconci was invited to the Rhode Island School of Design to ‘perform.’ During the day he met with students, critiqued work, and generally played the role of a visiting artist. As evening came and the time of the performance drew near, the gallery space filled up. Acconci wandered among the crowd, stopping and engaging people intermittently, all the while obsessively pushing the serrated edge of a bottle cap into the flesh of his hands and arms. Nothing else happened, and when people asked what he was doing with the bottle cap—he was making it fairly obvious—he replied: “I’m trying to make a good impression.” That was the ‘performance.’ The sense of it lies not in the one-line denouement, but rather in the proleptic process, the performative suspense, anticipation, and the array of subjective states—annoyance, suspicion, confusion, laughter—that were set into motion.2 In a similar work Acconci again uses the body—his own—as an impressionable surface, biting himself in order to leave a series of discrete (temporary) marks. This performance was also recorded, effectively transferring the surface bearing impressions to another ‘surface,’ the screen. Notions of screen, face, surface, interface, trace a common rhetoric of corporeality between works. Acconci’s Applications (1970, Super-8 film) is the filmed record of a live performance in which Acconci’s body is covered in imprints of bright red lipstick, applied by Kathy Dillon, who ‘smothers’ his upper body in kisses. Acconci then rubs the front of his body against Dennis Oppenheim’s back until all traces of color are transferred from his body to Oppenheim’s. In Dennis Oppenheim’s Identity Transfer [1970] a drawing by Oppenheim is inscribed onto the bare back of his son, who, tracing the tactile sensation, repeats as accurately as possible, the form of the drawing on the blank wall in front of him, a subtle commentary on notions of translation, transfer, traversal—of place, sense, generation, meaning, etc.3 A recent work, Identity Transfer (after Dennis Oppenheim) by Eduardo Villanes, performs a related a 'conceptual' transfer of identity, from the printed image to the TV image, oven the skin of the author, as a way of showing impunity over a case of human rights in Peru.4 There is, between an often unlikely constellation of works, an echo, a trace that crosses, and so makes salient, a common territory of representation, indeed, a problematics of representation. Sheng Shiyi’s works employ this echo-like structuring to circumscribe her own questions of place and displacement, identity and difference, setting them to work within a framework which is simultaneously intimate and public.

|| méconaissance… (expressions)

Many of the contemporary artistic practices that situate themselves in proximity to the body address issues of identity, cognition, or the body’s normative or exceptional articulation in social and technical spheres, there are also certain artists whose explorations of alterity and corporeality introduce a disturbance— throw into question— those determinations which are taken as material or medium by others. Sheng Shiyi is one of the most interesting of a generation of younger artists who take nothing as given, even— especially—the intimacies and intricacies between self and other. In a series of video pieces related to Allergie Culturelle, Shiyi has individuals perform actions or works from a cultural tradition different—sometimes radically—from their own. In one part of this work-in-progress she has a professional Asian singer perform arias from a western opera. With consummate professionalism and style, all of the inflections are wrong—a bit off, out of registration, mis-regarded. It is a beautiful, and uncanny moment, where both an echo of the music evoked, and the presence of a miscast variant cohabit5. It is a form of punning, what in rhetoric is named paronomasia. 6 The echo returns, nonidentical to itself, and in its foreignness, recalls that which is absent. It is a poignant comment on assimilation and simulation, communication, longing and solitude. It is the quality of “being out of place” of being displaced or culturally transposed, that Sheng Shiyi is exploring with this unfinished series of ‘portraits.’ In another work, Contemporary Cooperation, perhaps the most engaging and successful piece, a culturally diverse group of people are asked to meet for dinner. When they arrive—the cuisine is asian—they are all given chop-sticks; in this case, however, the chopsticks are almost a meter long, and quite impossible to employ in a conventional manner. Shiyi’s camera simply records what takes place, as people fumble, drop, or unexpectedly launch pieces of food into the air. It is engaging and funny, watching people’s frustrations and laughter. Finally one group of people figure out something that works very well with these new chop-sticks: they begin to feed each other. It is a sweet and generous lesson in the sociology of community.

||| dispositions…(photography)

There is a curious confluence between certain words in English and in French which, depending on the context, may be used to denote either objective conditions or subjective states. The word disposition, for example, may refer to a mood, temperament, or natural inclination. An inclination may refer as easily to the physical condition of a body resting at an angle as to a propensity, a habit, or an attitude. An attitude, in addition to connoting behavior, has a precise meaning regarding the position of an objective body relative to specified directions. Attitude may also mean a posture, a settled mode of thinking or a disposition. In French, disposition means a tendency, inclination, or aptitude, and the word dispositif, which translates the English apparatus, as device or set-up, also has the connotations of a configuration, system, or plan of operation. When one speaks then, of a disposition of the body, one may refer to its material conditions or tendencies, as much as to its unconscious, subjective, or performative states. Moreover it is inordinately difficult to draw a line, to determine boundaries—or even, for that matter to trace the contours of a mediating interface—between the different aspects of embodied being.7 Here, with a remarkable prescience towards the signs and senses of embodiment—as lived being, as a contiguity or metonymic presence, as a deictic (spatio-temporal) marker, as a trace, or as an interval—Sheng Shiyi takes up issues of corporeality and photography. In her works the shadow of the body is traced and reflected, doubled and deferred, inscribed as self and other, in a relentless exploration of its apprehensions, arrestments, deferrals and excesses. In some cases the trace is quite literal, as in those works which circulate around the presence of remnants, a blur of movement on the surface, a chair recently evacuated, a hat, abandoned.

Even in this digital world we still readily accept photography’s claim to verisimilitude, that in an indexical relation to the real, the light which impinges upon bodies fixed in a momentary interval before the camera, is the very same light that records this impression upon the photo-sensitive/chemical surface in a camera. When Roland Barthes says, looking at a photograph of the youngest brother of Napoleon, “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor,” he begins a subtle interrogation of precisely this ontology.8 The photograph is an indexical sign in that it ‘points to’ that which it depicts, its representamen, and it is for this reason that Barthes claims that it is impossible to see a photograph (or, one might add, subsequent media) since one only sees what a photograph refers to;. Photography is, in this sense, invisible. At the same time it also has a substantive presence, a “likeness . . . sent out from the surfaces of things,” bearing “the look and shape of the body from which it came.” 9 Photography thus takes up residence within the framework of technical reproducibility, from Plato’s shadows to Pliny’s tracings, as an evidentiary marker, an index of bodies, things, events. It is, like those relics of a more direct nature—hair and teeth, bones and raiments—similarly stabilized, even fetishized, as a privileged mark of presence, plural, teetering on the edge between recognition and méconaissance. Sheng Shiyi’s photographs—more precisely I should call hers a photographic process, since she often does not produce fixed stabile artifacts, but hundreds of intermediary contact sheets—take place within the everydayness of images, in relation to photography’s favored conceit of a “perfect moment.” Sheng Shiyi not so much rejects, as ignores, the notion of a “perfect moment” and seeks those moments that are just about to escape the gaze, those images which, just as they are caught, defy belief, which belie themselves in their strangeness or their inconsumability. These are the most interesting images. Sometimes they too, are overlooked. It is the great merit of Sheng Shiyi that she has a certain sensitivity to their loss, a certain engagement with their foreignness, that these invisible images are preserved.

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument; and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it we have access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to the humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception of things.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty10



notes


1. I have addressed related aspects of photography, and subsequent media, in various texts. See especially: “Projection and Dis/embodiment: Toward a Genealogy of the Virtual,” in Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, ed. Chrissie Iles, [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Abrams] (2001); “Variables: Notations on Stability, Permeability, and Plurality in Media Artifacts,” pp. 201–253, in Saving the Image: Art After Film, ed. Tanya Leighton, Pavel Buchler, [Glasgow and Manchester: Center for Photography/Glasgow and Manchester Metropolitan University] (2003); “Arrestments: Corporeality and Mediation,” Thomas Zummer, in Suturas y fragmentos: Cuerpos y territories en la ciencoa-ficción/Stitch and Split: Bodies and Territories in Science Fiction, Nuria Homs, Laurence Risser, eds., Fundacion Antoni Tapies/Constant vzw, Barcelona/Brussels, 2004-05; “Seeing Double: Eleanor Antin’s Roman Allegories,” Thomas Zummer, PAJ 83 A Journal of Performance and Art, May 2006 Volume XXVII, No. 2 [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] 2006; “Inter/sur/faces: Notes on the Recent Works of Heleen Deceuninck,” Thomas Zummer, in Temporalities, exh. cat., [Bruge: Free Space] 2006

2. This story was related to the author in conversation by Alan Sondheim, who was present in the audience at the time, and a friend of Acconci’s.

3. See: Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1974 [New York: Castelli-Sonabend]; Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films, 1975 Supplement [New York: Castelli-Sonabend]; See also: Conceptual Art, Ursula Meyer, [New York: E.P. Dutton] 1972; Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, Lucy Lippard, [New York: Praeger] 1973. Among other artists who deal, in a wide variety of ways, with corporealities, include Marina Abramovics, Vanessa Beecroft, Phil Collins, Alan Sondheim, Leslie Thornton, Foof’wa d’Immobilite, Nan Goldin, Araki, etc.

4. Identity Transfer (after Dennis Oppenheim) by Eduardo Villanes, was exhibited at the Espacio Fundacion Telefonica in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico City, the Tremaine Gallery, Connecticut, and various other venues. See also works by Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy (Fresh Acconci) and Marina Abramovics (a remaking of Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed” at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia), which range from incursion and cooptation to homage.

5. The structure of the uncanny: an eruption of the unfamiliar within the familiar as the familiar. The first five entries on “uncanny” in the Oxford English Dictionary all have to do with mischief, malice, carelessness, unreliability, lack of caution or trust, difficulty or severity—and uncomfortability, especially as regards the supernatural, the strange or unfamiliar. In the psychoanalytic register the term is far more determinate, and heavily theorized, such that it is put into play with discourses on simulation, mimesis, alterity, the sublime, the abject, the alien and the aesthetic. In modern robotics an uncanny threshold is reached at the point that a simulation is believably human enough such that any subsequent disparity in that illusion produces anxiety.

6. Paronomasia is a form of punning in which words which sound very similar, but not identical, are brought into close proximity, so that by being so close in sound each invokes the other to an indeterminate degree, causing a duplicity—a fibrillation—in the space of the trope. In other words, though each term sounds very like its counterpart, it is only almost a pun, since it also underscores the difference between them. Another term for Paronomasia is Aversio, or Turne-Tale. See: Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd Edition, [Berkeley: University of California Press] 1991; See also: Michael Hawcroft, Rhetoric: Readings in French Literature, [Oxford: Oxford University Press] 1999; and Marc Fumaroli, et al, Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne, 1450–1950, [Paris: Presses universitaires de France] 1999.

7. All definitions are from the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Sheng Shiyi’s studies have taken place in Paris, France, and in New York City, USA.

8. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida; Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans., (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981/ Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980).

9. The reference here is to Lucretius, quoted in extenso:

… I show that there
Exist what we call images of things,
Which as it were peeled off from the surfaces
Of objects, fly this way and that through the air;
These same, encountering us in wakeful hours,
Terrify our minds, and also in sleep, as when
We see strange shapes and phantoms of the dead
Which often as in slumber sunk we lay
Have roused us in horror; lest perchance we think
That spirits escape from Acheron, or ghosts
Flit among the living, or that after death
Something of us remains when once the body
And mind alike together have been destroyed,
And each to its primal atoms has dissolved. . . .

I say therefore that likenesses or thin shapes
Are sent out from the surfaces of things
Which we must call as it were their films or bark
Because the image bears the look and shape
Of the body from which it came, as it floats in the air

—T. Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura

For Lucretius the body casts off impressions, excressences, like the skin of a snake, or the exquisite exoskeletal husk of a cicada, negative traces of an absent body, both substance and phantasm. It is as apt a description of our apprehensions of photography as any modern account. This translation is from: Sir Ronald Melville, ed. Lucretius On The Nature of the Universe, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)

10. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis, trans., (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968





















Biographical Information on the Author

Thomas Zummer is an independent scholar and writer, artist and curator. His drawings, media, and sculptural works have shown world

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移民风标留学冷暖华埠今昔华人故事华人频道：
纽约华人艺术家以艺术融合中西
2009年11月20日 00:55　来源：中国新闻网　发表评论　　【字体：↑大 ↓小】


当地时间11月18日，即将在纽约美国华人博物馆开展的《此时此地：纽约的华人艺术家》展览的一角，盛识伊站在自己花两年时间完成的纽约二十多对“跨文化的配对”的图片前。该展览主即将于11月19日开展，参展四位艺术家以各种艺术手法展现中西文化间界限的跨越和交融。 中新社发 孙宇挺 摄

版权声明:凡注有“cnsphoto”字样的图片版权均属中国新闻网,未经书面授权,不得转载使用。【更多图片】
　　中新社纽约十一月十八日电　题：从“跨国配对”到“混血山水画”　纽约华人艺术家以艺术融合中西

　　中新社记者　孙宇挺

　　盛识伊正站在一面挂满照片的墙壁前介绍这些作品。每幅照片都看似是一个中西合璧的家庭，盛用图片讲述这些跨国姻缘的故事，其中也包括她自己的故事。

　　当年留学法国的时候，身边看到遇到了许多华人的跨国姻缘，于是盛识伊萌发了拍摄这些各色跨国配对的念头。她说，虽然两个人只是简单的个体，但却事实上代表了两个国家两种文化的冲突和融合。于是她扛着大画幅相机花了两年多时间去拍摄二十多对“跨文化的配对”，有些故事来自身边，有些是在街上遇到的，还有她自己的故事。


　　这是十九日即将在纽约美国华人博物馆开展的《此时此地：纽约的华人艺术家》第二部分展览的一角，这部分展览的主题是“跨越界限”。

　　十八日晚记者在该展媒体预览会上看到四位艺术家的作品以各种手法展现的中西文化间界限的跨越和交融。

　　在展厅另一侧，张宏图也在介绍他的作品。他用今天的油彩画笔临摹了南宋画家马远的《水图》。这种以西方笔法画东方古画的做法张宏图自称为混血山水画。

　　年轻时受过中国传统教育的他，经历了从“裹足”到找回真我的经历。纽约的二十六年多元文化创作艺术生涯给予他创作灵感。他说，“我曾设想中国古代的山水大师们到十九世纪末的巴黎，这种设想是我画了近十年混血山水画的出发点之一。”

　　张宏图《水图》的一旁，有五个雕塑头像，其中有佛头，也有华盛顿和林肯的头像，远远看去像是大理石雕成的，走近才发现，这些头像都是以书刊雕成。佛头来源于陈龙斌的国际佛祖计划。

　　陈说，佛头象征着一个重要的中国文化，但却经常为西方社会误读，在这个计划中，他以博物馆发现的美丽佛头为蓝本，使用纽约市电话簿为创作材料，“雕出”这些佛头。“佛头承载着纽约百万居民的名字和电话，象征一个悉心照料西方世界的东方佛祖。”陈龙斌说。

　　关于如何将这些书刊雕塑成头像，陈说是用牙医磨具磨出来的。

　　在展厅的中央还陈设着他的最新作品，三十本中文书和三十本外文书分别构成两个彼此相扣的圆环，吊在空中，如同纽约常见的中西交错的文化融合。

　　在展厅的一隅，展出的是费明杰关于植物雕塑的探索成果，在他的雕塑花园中，充满了中西方植物的融合混种，有些甚至是文化。他曾将中国神话中摇钱树的叶子和巴西的猴头瓢长在同一棵树上。创造这种杂合性为特点的艺术，对于费明杰来说，是一种莫大的兴奋。

　　展览的组织方称，本次展览旨在探索四位艺术家对待文化界限时所采取的方法。在落脚这个城市以前，中国文化是他们的故土文化，在逐渐融入纽约之后，他们才各自发现无论生活还是艺术都无法回避跨文化的话题，他们作品中某种杂合性，表现出对跨文化话题的着力，但对于这些话题的反应，却各有不同。完　

一部《 A Surprise in Texas〉参加2010年的美国洛山机贝弗利希尔斯电影节。我们一起捧回了两项大奖：观众评选的最佳纪录片，及评审团的最佳摄像奖。
导演 ：Peter Rosen 。 曲尼拉姆（盛识伊）在这部片担任导演助手。

这是关于洛山机贝弗利希尔斯电影节的相关联接：
美国贝弗里山电影节由美国电影界众多知名明星、制片人、发行人共同发起，旨在为全球独立电影制作者与美国电影工业体系搭建一个双向交流的桥梁。本届电影节在美国洛杉矶举行，评委会在全球近３０００余部报名电影中筛选了一些入围电影亮相。《在得克萨斯得惊喜》获得观众评选的最佳纪录片，及评审团的最佳摄像奖两项大奖。
pdf/bhff2010-sm1a.pdf

born in Jinhua, Zhejiang of China, earned her BFA from Normal University of Zhejiang and her DNAP at Ecole Supérieure des Beau- Arts de Marseille in France. She has traveled and shown extensively in Europe, the United States and Asia. Currently she lives in both New York and China.
Currently she lives in New York and China.

Shiyi has distinguished herself from other young Chinese artists with her works based on contemporary evolution of Chinese culture, influenced by philosophy of Kong Zi, Lao-zi, Zhuang-zi and Zen Buddhism. Her artworks are known for their subtlety, depth and insight that express her love for Chinese culture and her excitement and anxiety over what may be lost in the current revolution. In each piece Shiyi thoughtfully explores her concepts in a variety different media including video, installation, photograph, performance.

She was personally selected by the world renowned artist Xu Bing to exhibit her works with him in the "Archaeology of the Future: the Second Triennial of Chinese Art", at the Nanjing Museum in 2005 .
Her videos were shown at the Fountain Art Fair in Miami, 2007; at the 3rd Annual New Video Art Exhibition (SCOPE) in New York, 2008; and at the ''Shoot Me" Film Festival, Netherlands, 2008.

Also her works will be featured in an exhibition at Zhengda Museum of China in Winter 2008 and in 2009 March, MOCA Museum in NY opening group show and annual exhibition at the Wannas Foundation Museum in Sweden .
Additionally, her pieces are part of the permanent collection in several national collections in Europe, China and New York.

.