Cc Foundation & Art Centre is pleased to announce the opening of Late Night Savage, an exhibition by Liu Wa in collaboration with Yang Bao on Saturday, May 29, 2021, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. It is Liu’s first institutional solo presentation in 2021. The two artists spent nearly seven months creating this multi-sensory and ever-evolving soundscape, seeking to heighten the audience’s sensuous receptivity to the more-than-human world.
Divided into two spatial chapters, Late Night Savage encompasses five new artworks, focusing on the day and night of three plants (tumbleweed, sunflower and camel grass) at nuclear sites developed during the Cold War in the United States, the former Soviet Union and China. The two artists embarked on an 11,000-mile journey to conduct field research at the sites in Washington state, U.S. and Gansu, China, and lived among these plants.
The two-channel video Late Night Savage transports the audience to the plants’ world through emotive visuals, visceral music and intimate songs by the two artists. As a symbol for the American West, tumbleweeds, propelled by the force of the wind, tumble around to spread radioactive seeds at the nuclear reactor in Washington State. Sunflowers are planted at Chernobyl and then harvested and disposed of, as a cheap corrective method to clean up the contamination. Camel grass at the nuclear city in Gansu, China, embodies the patriotic zeitgeist for dedicating one’s life to the motherland. However, both camel grass and tumbleweeds are in fact invasive species from Russia that disregard land borders, freely traversing the landscapes. Genetic mutation caused by ionizing radiation speeds up the plants’ irreversible aging process, leading to an increase in its entropy. While living means fighting a losing battle against nature, the short-lived plants still display incredible resilience and savageness.
The paintings in the second room capture four impressions of the plants. On each of Liu’s paintings, a black geometric shape compresses the eruptive life force into a deafening void, from which Bao’s music mutates and refracts in infinity. The four pieces of music are experienced in both chaos and synchrony, connected by their underlying patterns and rules. The organic and psychedelic combination of sound resembles echoes in the canyon, enabling the static paintings to flow and transform with endless possibilities.
The intent of this exhibition is not so much to anthropomorphize the plants, but to transcend and “vegetalize” our human perceptions, rethinking the man-made boundaries among ourselves. The artists observe and reimagine the life of plants through video and sound installation, paintings and music. In the daytime, the plants dedicate themselves to fulfilling the obligations assigned by humans, but in the nighttime, they morph into phantoms and savages, dancing till the end of the world.
The silent carnival of these nameless actors has never been alien to us. We are all savages.
