Someday
Yao Peng
姚朋
Production date
2011
Object Detail
Media
newspaper
Measurements
60 x 83 cm
Notes
Someday (2011) takes a text form central to the ideological machinery of the Chinese state as its basis. Yao Peng has painstakingly cut many words and photographs from an issue of the People’s Daily newspaper from 16 May 1984, the day of his birth. The sheer laboriousness of the task is astonishing – to neatly cut out small Chinese characters from headlines and subheadings, and slice individual figures out of photographs, would have been immensely time-consuming. In the columns of smaller text, each character removed leaves behind a neat, square window. The strips of paper that once were headlines, figures from photographs, and columns of news are piled beside the remaining newspaper, and its lace-like pattern of holes. Order and structure are gone, chaos reigns. The events of a particular day are no longer of any import, except in so far as the day has a personal significance for the artist. Yao says the paper has been reduced to ‘a pool of ashes’.
Accession number
2011.120