THE EDGE OF THE WORLD AT CLOSE QUARTERS
August 2020
9.5×42cm/9×38cm/6×32cm/15×41cm
Ink and color on paper
Since early 2020, I started to have a habit of reading news every day, although it was usually bad news.
Pandemic statistics are what I must read every day. Charts of various regions can be found intuitively as a flat world map by some app via mobile phone, in the palm of my hand. The world became so small that some pieces gradually turned red, or black and they finally were connected. It looks like “Hill on Hill in Red” by Li Keran, all the leaves of forests turn red in the landscape while the wind blows treetops.
When the world is in the palm of my hand, the edge of the world is just at close quarters.
Thus I began to create “The Edge of the World at Close Quarters.”
The work is still unfinished to this day. At Zhang Yanzi’s major 2025 solo exhibition Transience, the artist remade the piece into a video installation. She carved indented slits shaped like measuring rulers into the walls of her custom-built space. Visitors peer through these ruler openings to watch the phantasmagoric footage inside the chamber. This peculiar viewing perspective urges viewers to reconsider the fundamental scale of their relationship to the physical world and existential nothingness.
2025