About the Series · The Two-Legged Experiment
The Two-Legged Experiment
The artist takes his two legs as method and walking as ontological practice. One leg treads the system — the parasitic critique of the Rijksakademie, taking the white cube as proving ground; one leg treads the wilderness — the extreme nomadism of “20 Days,” taking no funding, no premise and no network as self-legislation. The two legs are not opposites but a dialectical co-existence: the mirrored recoil of the system and the negative creation of the wilderness constitute a flood-crossing in the manner of Chongren Li'en. Walking itself is the answer — not arrival, but dancing with the void in the fissure.
Full Essay
The Two-Legged Experiment: Walking as Ontological Method
The artist's creative life presents itself as a distinctive “two-legged structure” — one leg treading the system, one leg treading the wilderness, taking walking itself as ontological practice and completing the continuous renewal of the self in dialectical tearing.
The Leg of the System: Parasitic Critique
In the Rijksakademie period (2005–2006), the artist took the Hiscox Art Award selection as his point of entry, converting the material remainder of earlier projects — the extreme traces of 20 Days, the situated experiments of Lijiang Studio — into a “problem consciousness” for academy jurors. The paradox of this stage lies in this: entering the system in the posture of institutional critique, contending for the recognition of the white cube in an anti-white-cube language. The juxtaposition in the exhibition of scaffolding, temporary installation and consumer signs is both a metaphor for the rootlessness of the nomadic body and a resistance to the standardised display of academy space. Nietzsche's “will to power” appears here as an institutionalised game — not overturning from outside, but producing fissures from within, subverting the system's logic in the system's language.
The Leg of the Wilderness: Negative Creation
The core methodology of the four-country extreme practice of the 20 Days project (1999–2001) — Kunming, France, New Zealand, the Netherlands — is the active dismantling of every safety net: no funding, no premise, no network, knowing no one. This is not enforced poverty but a self-set existential trial. The artist takes the naked body as a probe, measuring the boundaries of subjectivity in a globalised context. The torn black-and-white images are not a record of trauma but a visual vow to actively choose one's fate within “eternal recurrence”; the confrontation with consumer signs is the contemporary practice of “revaluing all values.” Zhuangzi's “free and easy wandering” is here made flesh — depending on nothing outside, reaching “the land of nothing whatsoever” at the extreme through the poor materials of “the use of the useless.”
The Dialectic of the Two Legs: A Flood-Crossing in the Manner of Chongren Li'en
The leg of the system and the leg of the wilderness are not opposing choices but a dialectical co-existence. In Chongbantu, the creation epic of the Naxi Dongba religion, Chongren Li'en passes through flood, the trials of the heavenly realm and the obstruction of demons, and finally rebuilds the order of the human world with will and ingenuity. The artist's “two legs” are precisely a contemporary re-enactment of this archetype: the leg of the system supplies the cognitive framework of the “heavenly realm” — international art discourse, curatorial logic, jury mechanisms; the leg of the wilderness supplies the extreme trial of the “flood” — the naked state of no funding, no language, no identity. Not choosing the heavenly realm or the flood, but bearing the tearing of both at once, and completing in that tearing the renewal of identity and the remaking of the world.
Walking Itself: From Burning to Illuminating
This “two-legged structure” runs through the artist's entire creative life. The local rootedness of Lijiang Studio in 2003 is the extension of the leg of the wilderness from “international nomadism” toward “rural co-existence”; the public circulation of the “Jianghu” project in the same period is the diffusion of the leg of the system from the “white cube” toward the “social site.” Closing Lijiang Studio in 2009, the wandering of “donating the self” in 2011–2012, taking monastic vows in Myanmar in 2013, the three-year retreat of 2014–2017, are all the continuing deepening of the two legs advancing in alternation — not fleeing from system to wilderness, nor returning from wilderness to system, but maintaining an eternal tension and balance between the two.
Walking itself is the answer. The end of the extreme is not victory but dance; the end of heroism is not the throne but jianghu. The artist's “two legs” finally point toward a Zhuangzian state of the “true person” — a free and easy body in which “the form has something it forgets,” moving with free play of the blade in the fissures between system and wilderness, not resisting with force but wandering with wisdom.