What printed on my cement bricks are the real estate advertisement in Beijing in 2007 named by foreign placenames and foreigners’ names.
Our calligraphers often say that from a hundred years of history, a genius will not necessarily rise. The great Master Baishi used to say : « Who learns with me shall live. Who tries to copy me shall die… »
What we have to ask ourselves today is the following question : what must we learn from the Westerners ? During friendship years between China and France, French people rushed to the Confucius exhibition in Paris, while my neighbour was building a copy of the Garden of Venice in a suburb of Beijing, though it lacks water dreadfully…
A day will come when Chinese real estate promoters will have become rich enough to run a risk, that of stopping to copy foreigners, so to attempt putting the Occidental know-how in the service of creativity and research of a new Chinese architecture.
Then, “Rebels” like me will not have anything to say anymore…
Life is short, but I think I will be a witness to this day…
The installation “Topography of tomorrow’s Beijing” represents a whole set of advertisements for real estate facilities, that can be surveyed by walking around Beijing, in this Year 57 after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China… These advertisements are printed over cement bricks, contemporary material of Chinese architecture ; they are signed, numbered and dated in the way traditional golden bricks* were, and displayed upon supermarket stalls. Stickers indicate their prices and origins…
material：brick
Dimension: 30cm x 15cm x 7cm/brick，installation dimension variable
Edition: 12
