Double Standard
Chen Yufan
陈彧凡
Production date
2010
Object Detail
Media
acrylic and pencil on canvas
Measurements
2 panels, each 180 x 100 cm
Notes
‘Double Standard’ is part of a larger series of works, the Zhuangzi series, alluding to one of the foundational texts of Daoism, and also to its writer, the philosopher Zhou Zhuang, also known as Zhuangzi. It appears from a distance to be two pages of closely printed text. But on closer inspection, the tiny ‘words’ are revealed to be rows of dots, holes which have been burned into the paint with a soldering iron. Arranged in groups of different numbers of dots, they may have no linguistic value, but they suggest a code. Chen Yufan says they represent his own transliteration or interpretation of sections of the Zhuangzi texts – Double Standard utilises a system of dot clusters which, if only they could be decoded, could be read. Ironically, Daoist philosophy views language as a somewhat suspect attempt to pin down and classify the nature of things, an attempt doomed to failure in a fluid and dynamic universe. Zhuangzi said:
What I value most [in speech, words] is the meaning to express.
But meaning has something elusive in it,
And this something that stays beyond the captured meaning
Cannot be expressed through words.
Chen Yufan says that the process of creating minimalist works such as ‘Double Standard’, with its essentially meaningless repeated action of burning holes, is an exercise of emptying the mind, like Buddhist meditation.
What I value most [in speech, words] is the meaning to express.
But meaning has something elusive in it,
And this something that stays beyond the captured meaning
Cannot be expressed through words.
Chen Yufan says that the process of creating minimalist works such as ‘Double Standard’, with its essentially meaningless repeated action of burning holes, is an exercise of emptying the mind, like Buddhist meditation.
Accession number
2011.019