` ❥~ TIANRAN QIAN ✶.✩
Research-based creative practioner, strategist, producer, and digital talent agent.
Exploring how to hack for space in this alien aesthetic machine.
Currenty based in New York
Research interests:
computational aesthetics, text-image transmediality, word concept relations, epistimology knowledge representation, print to electronic texuality, digital image, human-AI collaboration in art, Chinese calligraphy, comparative approaches...
tianran.space@gmail.com
@_tianran_
👀
大 Big
2023.05
大 Big (Version 4)
- Site-specific Installation
- Size: 275″ x 275″ x 30″
- Material: 0.18mm PVC, air
- Manufactured by: 南京北斗气球陶
This big transparent inflatable takes the shape of the Chinese character 大, meaning big. We’re looking at a very big “big” here.
Big represents an omnipresent power that is so overwhelming, oppressive and impossible, meanwhile so trivial, absurd, and merely symbolic. Power is conveyed through knowledge, with signifiers serving as representations of concepts—flimsy like air.
This 7-meter (275″) tall inflatable takes up space with air contained within its plastic skin. Its transparency mitigates the enormity of its scale, echoing how technologies of power maximize efficiency by rendering itself transparent for conceal, especially in this data-logical apparatus.
Its large scale disrupts the normal flow of any space it occupies, highlighting the space’s typical arrangement of production through this contrast of interruption. However, the perception of its scale is always relative to its environment.
Beyond attracting attention as a spectacle, its physical scale renders the object self-explanatory and devoid of meaning.
This project has undergone various material iterations as the concept evolved.
Initially, I wanted to create a spectacle that draws attention purely through its size. At the time, I visited many art shows and fairs, and observed that the pieces that excited visitors the most were the biggest and most shining pieces, triumphing with loudness in this attention economy driven my cognitive capitalism.
As Guy Debord describes in The Society of The Spectacle, "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity." Our quality of life becomes impoverished through quantification, while our true perceptions get subsumed into the measurable capacity.
Big presents capacity itself — or, affect itself.
Before that...
Version 3
Size: 150″ x 93″
Location: the wall in my room
The third version was painted in clear acrylic on a wall upon my return to the US. I observed that power operates through more invisible means here, by becoming the ambiance of environment itself. The 大 remains on the wall, while hiding in plain sight. Interestingly, nearly everyone who has visited the room has missed it.
Version 2
Size: 120″ x 120″
Location: all around Shanghai
The second version was a 3-meter (120’”) tall red inflatable that I made in Shanghai after the Covid-19 lockdown. It is red, the loudest color, as the violence I felt was right in my face without hiding. I positioned 大 in various public settings, from apartment staircases to corporate offices, gyms, cafes, and other everyday environments, serving as both an exhibition and a disruption.
Version 1
Size: 23″ x 27″
The first version was ceramic, with a sense of permanence and heaviness. However, the scale was limited to the available kiln size.