039A Drifting without roots

Artist's Name：陳力 Chen Li 

2023
Sculpture
2x 2 m

 "Perhaps subconsciously, my life is like a tree uprooted from its roots, and so my installation becomes a metaphor for my life."
"Drifting without roots" is a common state of existence encountered by modern people. Nowadays, the whole space, body, other people, architecture, city, and the globe all erode and disintegrate the sense of spatial existence deep in our hearts and minds, and put people in a kind of rootless floating state.
On the other hand, due to the accelerated development of urbanization, people have become invisible under the oppressive space of the city, and the roots of the tree have stopped growing above the branches because they cannot take root. The exposed roots are a visual metaphor for drifting. Underneath the tree roots hang more than 400 tickets collected from all over the country, with a total of more than 800 names of places of departure and destination: some are other places, some are hometowns, constituting different spatial trajectories. The combined form of tree root plus ticket has the sentiment of a wishing tree, a wish for the desire to be rooted, and a revolt against the rootlessness of drifting, the
 Leaving the soul:
 the home is faded and its shape has become dilapidated because of drifting. Over time, iron has traveled to many places, encountered sand and wind leading to oxidation and corrosion, generating rust. The rust becomes a trace of their wanderings. The work is inspired by the house of the old family, deconstructed into three elements, interspersed with iron beams, while maintaining the overall formal compositional relationship. On the other hand, the softness of the jelly wax and the hardness of the iron create a strong contrast in texture, aiming to show the conflict between the wanderer's inner wanderings and his return home.
 No Shore: 
The meaning of "root" has been disintegrated to a certain extent in modern drift. The dispersal of family members, the weakening of social ties, and emotional indifference have become the norm. The modern city is devoid of emotions, and psychologically it rejects any personal emotions.
 In the work, a wire boat hangs in the air, and eight glass bottles containing small boats are suspended below the boat. When the wire boat starts to rock forward, the glass bottles underneath sway along with the sound of impact, and the big boat and the eight small boats start to drift. It looks like a big ship wrapped with small boats sailing aimlessly. The wire boat is a metaphor for the big time, and the glass is transparent and fragile, similar to the emotions and hearts of the drifters.
 The artwork aims to reveal the hidden dimension of drifting: we are placed under the ship of modernity, which cannot provide a relatively stable meaning, and begin to drift without a root, with no support for our ever-fluctuating personal emotions and psyche. Like a boat that can never dock, each of us is closed and wanders separately.

Artist bio

Born in Guizhou in 1998, he now lives in Hong Kong, pursuing a Master of Arts in Creative Media Arts Practice at the City University of Hong Kong.

The experience of growing up in the midst of ‘drifting’ and ‘dispersal’ has endowed him with unique social insights and sensibilities, prompting him to carry out a series of related researches. In the process, he has paid attention to the emotional and psychological problems brought by the mobile modernity to the marginalised groups in the society, and his research findings have been published in CSCW,、IEEE、ISEA and other journals. 

He is good at using multi-media such as video and installation, and his works have been exhibited at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, Guangdong Museum of Art, Goethe-Institut, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, CICA Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea, West Coast Art Centre in Shanghai, Shanghai New International Expo Centre, etc. He has also participated in many art competitions and won prizes. Currently, he is dabbling in socially engaged art, focusing on emotional narratives and critical themes of the general public.He has recently initiated a new media urban art project on the theme of ‘Migrant Drift and Urban Change’, which is participatory and sustainable and is centred around Hong Kong.