“A Thought in A Gaze” is one of the nine sections of the 2023 Chengdu Biennale’s theme “Time Grav- ity”, which aims to explore the relationship between “seeing” and “being seen”. The act of gazing constructs the subject of “seeing” and the object of “being seen”, creating an intertextual relationship between “self” and “others”. “Gaze” arises from time and space, thus forming a gravitational field between physical mass terms of “subject”, “object”, “self”, and “others”, and endowing the process of “seeing” with multiple associations. In Western philosophy, the term “others” provides a feasible interpretation for subjectifying the gaze on the self and objectifying the gaze on the object. In the image era of postmodern cultural landscape, with the change of the ways of seeing and the change of images themselves, gazing at the “object of seeing” has become a context of contemporary life. Under the premise of visualization, gaze combines the identity consciousness of the seer, and visuality becomes an important strategy and a new social cultural logic. Undoubtedly, the theoretical study of gaze must answer the question of “how to gaze” and explore the time consciousness and spatial field in “gaze”. How do we gaze? How does the object being gazed at react to us? The answer will always be open, and it lies in the time context given by the past, the present, and the future.
The section of “A Thought in A Gaze” echoes the concept of “gaze” from multiple dimensions. Artists become observers of the times from humanistic, a priori, and individual experiential perspectives. The times respond to this observation in a dynamic and developing way. When artists’ observations are presented to the public in the form of works, artists and times become objects that are “seen”, and each audience becomes a true “seer”. As a result, art works as social “media” form an effective gravitational field between history, present and future, while time and space achieve mutual conversion of energy in the exhibition space.
This section features the self-sincere reflections of thirty-five artists from China, the United States, and Italy, whose visual image worlds make a self-passionate narrative of the radically changing social reality. The overall structure of the exhibition includes representative contemporary artists as well as new artists; it presents the status of academic artists as well as professional artists; it emphasizes the local characteristics of contemporary art as well as the international dialogue. The age span of the artists, from “post-50s” to the “post-80s”, reveals the consciousness of the times and the great waves of change behind them, and the “gaze of the times” and the “times of gaze” also can be sensed between the images of the works, making the “seeing” and the “seen” form a non-fixed, interchangeable spatial field. Who is gazing? Who is the initiator of the gaze? And who is the final gazer? When the gaze enters into a cycle of constant switch and game where forces collide with each other, and the temporal and spatial fields are entangled, “A Thought in A Gaze” does not build a static exhibition field, but empowers the images created by the artists, thus obtaining the direct and weighty energy of examination and reflection in the temporal context of existence and nihility, self and others, comple- ment and conflict.