QIANHUI QIAN

Fluorescent confession is an interdisciplinary project of my collaboration with Madeline Schuldt, an environmental toxicologist from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. This work is made up of two parts. The first part is the video played on TV, in which she performs spray painting on a printed world map. The performance is about how pollution grows in the context of environmental toxicology. Over the next 60 years, how fluorescently colored pollutants are spreading, how they spread across the globe. Also, the background music sampled NASA's earth sound. The off-screen part is made up of a ton of soil and sand. This work is displayed in a completely painted black space in the gallery. After entering this room, all the senses are activated, including sight, hearing, smell, and touch. The audience is free to walk around with the soft earth under their feet. The smell and feel of the earth is a kind of pure primitive happiness, which also triggers the viewer to reflect on what we have done wrong to nature itself. What bad decisions are we making?

"Confession" is a very religious concept. I do not use this word to arouse religious emotions, but to reflect on a rational and neutral way. People are not born with the emotion and impulse of "confessing", and it is the sadness brought by the passing of beautiful things that makes us unable to escape the fate of eventually confessing.