on MOCA

Minji Kim
Blog Entry 4

On October 7th, our class went to MoCA Shanghai envisage III. While
there were some interesting works, I thought that it would have been
much better if everything had a concrete explanation next to the work,
which might be difficult in reality since many works aim for
abstraction. Looking at different installation artworks, one piece
called "Try hard to forget" stood out to me, maybe because it was a
little easier to recognize its theme than other pieces' were. This
piece was done by Yu Tianzhu and it was to express "a personal and
collective amnesia, deliberately affecting identity, value, and
everything," according to the given pamphlet. In this mixed media
work, there were hundreds of people with all of their faces scratched
off. When I first looked at it, I thought it was to display feelings
of hatred, since the touch seemed quite rough. (Again, another
magnificent trait of art is that audiences can interpret it whichever
way they want it to be.) There was no explanation next to it, so I had
no idea what Tianzhu was thinking when making this piece, and still I
am unsure of his intentions behind it. But what attracted me was that
I 'felt' it somehow. In the photograph, people were all gathered
together to cheer for something, and even though I couldn't see their
facial expressions, I knew that they were smiling, laughing, and
delightfully talking to each other. It was strange to see faces
without physically seeing them. Within the overall
"seems-to-be-pleasurable" atmosphere, each individual's rubbed face
added opposite feelings of calmness. It was strange. But if I have to
define this work, I would say; serenity within clamor, sadness within
happiness, forgetfulness within effort for memories.