…Through Housework Ritual, Automatic Happening and other “food-related” works, we see a new direction emerge, one that highlights video art forms and their relationship to the artist’s working habits; this new direction has a methodological significance. Libreria Borges is dedicated to the discovery and promotion of the few artists who are capable of an integrated artists narrative. 

Beginning with a respect for the logical relation between these works, we have titled this exhibition “Zuo Shi,” exploiting the word (shi) hybrid and ambiguous cross between a noun and a verb, and attempting to summarize the basic elements and rhythms of Fang Lu’s recent works. Fang Lu has offered a non-corresponding, but related English word for the exhibition: “Eclipse.” It’s astronomical meaning is to “consume” another entity, which can also be extended to mean “obstruct something from view.” This is another self-interpretation of artwork fueled by words, perhaps it will be the theme in the next phase. Why not? In Antonioni’s film Identification of a Woman (1982), the woman’s exposure and subsequent confusion ultimately triggered a lamentation on the universe, it becomes the extraordinary theme of the film. Thus, even if not emerging from the same considerations or experiences, you could even call it “good fortune,” but in this moment, Fang Lu is capable of directing us into the sky above our heads, inadvertently allowing us a brief moment in which we can escape the notion of reality that relies on the image. Moreover, building on the extended meaning of “eclipse,” “transcendence” has made a timely appearance in Fang Lu’s works, and each transcendence is not merely of oneself, but also of the tradition of images, and the environment in which images are produced. 

Similar to Fang Lu filming Automatic Happening in her studio on the basis of her daily life, for the vernissage of “Eclipse” we will project works outdoors. Not only invited visitors can see, but through their own windows, our neighbors will also be entreated to the images of this irrational performance being projected on the mysterious building opposite them. This is neither to please, nor to provoke, instead we hope to seek for possibilities within the constructed relationship. In fact, through the many works collected into an exhibition, this is necessarily a spatial-temporal extension of her work, ultimately it is “of this world,” or as Robbe-Grillet has said: “The world was created on the silver screen.” 

— Text written by Chen Tong, published with exhibition Eclipse, Borges Libreria Contemporary Art Institute, 2011.  Translation by Lee Ambrozy