klfpsub4_pusongling

Pu Songling:

One day Mr Chu, MA, chanced upon a certain monastery, within … they found only an old priest in déshabillé … who showed them murals painted on either side … life-like representations of men, animals, fairies … among whom was a young girl whose maiden tresses were not yet confined by the matron’s knot. She was picking flowers and gently smiling, while her cherry lips seemed about to move ...

Rolf A Kluenter:

From the very moment that we, as human beings, attained consciousness a fundamental tension has ground our passage through life. We ceaselessly ask ourselves:

‘From where does this consciousness spring?’

‘What is the use of these physical bodies that chain us so to the mundane? ’

‘If only we could take flights of pure consciousness, uncoupled from physical form’

‘What substance does our illusive consciousness take hereafter?’

Simon Kirby:

The Ke Luo Fu Project, a series of ambitious installation works of which Core-Periphery One forms one part, inhabits and expands border regions between perceived realities, utopian reveries and contestedly fabricated virtual realms. It shows the artist’s own creative researches opening into a universe of philosophical endeavour, historical allusion, spiritual yearning and fearless heralding of the possibilities of a technological human future.

Pu Songling:

Mr. Chu gazed for a long time ... until at last he became unconscious of everything but the thoughts that were engrossing him. Then, suddenly he felt himself floating in the air, as if riding on a cloud, and found himself passing through the wall, where halls and pavilions stretched away one after another, unlike the abodes of mortals. …. after a few moments perceived a gentle tug at his sleeve. … Turning round, he saw the young girl above-mentioned, who walked laughing away. Together..,. they fell on their knees and worshiped heaven and earth together, and rose up as man and wife.’

Rolf A Kluenter:

Our troubled human metaphysical enquiries give rise to restless creative acts. Acts through which we attempt to enter pure consciousness unencumbered by these weighty bodies. In these attempts we grasp at all of the evolving technological tools of expression as they become available to us in our human evolution.

Simon Kirby:

The exterior of Kleunter’s installation work is a cuboid, room-sized container. The external walls and the ground around it chronicle, through images, text and allusion, the non-bodily journeyings of Metaphysician Chu. By extension they also invite us, the participant, to journey with Pu and with Kluenter on journeys of our own.

Pu Songling:

The young lady’s companions laughed and said “My dear, you are now a married woman, and should leave off that maidenly coiffure." So they gave her the proper hairpins and head ornaments, and bade her go bind her hair, at which she blushed very much but said nothing.

… suddenly they heard a sound like the tramping of heavy-soled boots, accompanied by the clanking of chains and the noise of angry discussion… They saw a man clad in golden armor, with a face as black as jet, carrying in his hands chains and whips …. “If,” said he, “any mortal is here concealed amongst you, denounce him at once, and lay not up sorrow for yourselves.” … In her terror she said to Mr. Chu, “Hide yourself under the bed,” and opening a small lattice in the wall, disappeared herself. Mr. Chu in his concealment hardly dared to draw his breath…

Rolf A Kluenter:

The vocabularies created by new digital technology have generated the possibility of endless new kinds of simulations to express human metaphysical yearning. Yet these vocabularies have not yet in themselves resolved any of humankind’s great dilemmas.

Simon Kirby:

Step inside and Kleunter’s installation becomes the interior of the artist’s studio. A continuously opening door gives onto a corner the urban Shanghai. The continuously closing door brings us back into the artist’s own internal realm. Eight interlinked, continuously evolving narratives are projected across the interior. The protagonists, roughly captured in stop motion animation, include the artist himself (unseen); the artist’s fox spirit muse; and fragments of the artist’s work (paintings, sculpture and other fetishised objects). These populate a studio of the imagination: attired in conceptual, digital extensions to its own feeling body’

Pu Songling:

Then with his finger the old priest tapped the wall and called out, “Friend Chu! What makes you stay away so long?” At this, the likeness of Mr. Chu was figured upon the wall, with his ear inclined in the attitude of one listening. .. immediately Mr. Chu descended from the wall, standing transfixed like a block of wood, with starting eyeballs and trembling legs.….

Rolf A Kluenter:

Digital technologies and designed manipulation of our own DNA has brought us to a great threshold of possibility. The human being must certainly not halt here. We will become capable of merging our physical beings – in newly created and mutated forms through genetic modification - with all of the endless possibilities of implanted digitalized technology. At last we will become capable, and very soon, of metaphysical - physical journeying of our own navigation.

Simon Kirby:

The painted, the sculpted, the photographed and filmed, the documented, and the digitally generated meld in an array of confusion. Random coincidence is excluded. Allusions are made to violence exposed, to spiritual cynicism, sexual errancy and to deep erotic tenderness. Allusions that embrace existential confrontation and peer into abysses of subjugation and release. Kluenter’s intense staging is imbued with philosophical resignation and with swelling, global, digital saturation. Inevitably, human evolution leads us to deep submersion into virtual depths; and ultimately to profound amphibious genetic mutation.

Here they all noticed that the young lady on the wall with the maiden’s tresses had changed the style of her coiffure to that of a married woman. Mr. Chu was greatly astonished at this and asked the old priest the reason.

He replied, “Visions have their origin in those who see them: what explanation can I give?”

Simon Kirby, Putuo District, Shanghai. April 2009.

footnotes:

Title quote and text in italic from Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio [Liaozhai Zhiyi 聊斋志异] by Pu Songling [蒲松龄] 1640 － 1715. Abridged from Herbert Allen Giles (8 December 1845 – 13 February 1935)’s translation 1880. The staring point and inspiration for Kleunter’s installation work Core Periperhy One.

Artist quotes from conversations with writer Simon Kirby. Shanghai. March - April 2009

Interpretation by Simon Kirby, expanded from a 2008 collaborative text written with the artist at the outset of the Ke Luo Fu project.