Zhou Bin
Zhou Bin
Diary: 1986-2015.
2015
Paper, video documentation, 4’ 50”. Total dimensions 150×75×10 cm
Courtesy of the artist
A world-famous artist known for his performances and political actions, in 2015 Zhou Bin took all of his diaries dating back to 1986 (with a total weight of 5.25 kg) to a traditional paper workshop in Jiajiang County, Sichuan Province. There he turned them into paper mass and then, after numerous manipulations, into clean paper. The stack of new sheets reminds us that we can always start afresh—literally with a clean sheet—and that in the end people do not really leave any trace.
The horizon of meanings produced by Diaries encompasses a wide range of contexts related to humans’ experience of time and place. The moment the black ink meets the white paper can be seen as an encounter between presence and absence, a clash between two forces. In other words, a visualization of what in Chinese philosophy is known as the Great Separation (the first stage of cosmogenesis), which is also graphically expressed through yin and yang. The destruction of a diary is also a psychoanalytical way of dealing with past events. In this respect it is important that the artist turns to the traditional method of paper making (or recycling), entrusting years of his life to a particular tradition that has supplied paper to people in search of meaning for thousands of years.
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