NI HAIFENG - THE PARA-TEXTUAL

My practice stems from an interest in systems of culture, language, economy and the politics of the everyday. Through photography, video and installation, I seek to explore the simultaneous creation and obliteration of meaning. The attempt to subvert the status quo of the ‘dominant economic order’ and counteract preconceived notions of meaning play a key role within my recent practice, lending the works their political and social dimension.
Warehouse No.10 (1988), Warehouse No.3 (1988) and Statement (1988) are part of the series of works I created in 1988. Mostly situated in disused warehouses, the works existed only as temporary installations. The warehouse itself was chosen as a metaphor for emptiness. In those early works, numbers, mathematical symbols and equations (mostly mistaken) were densely written over the walls, objects and floors, covering the interior or sometimes exterior of warehouses. Sometimes this writing would be further reduced to repeat just one number, the number five for instance. I was searching for a language entirely without meaning, a zero language, so mathematics was the ideal choice. Writing nonsense equations and fragmented symbols. I then reduced this language further into meaninglessness. In this language of degree zero, meaning is no longer the semantic contents but the act of writing itself.
The impossibility of portraying the self takes a central position in Unfinished Self-Portrait (2003-ongoing). The conceptual starting point for this work is my digital passport photo, deconstructed into a sequence of computer code. I use this data to paint in situ on walls, doors, windows and/or floors of exhibition spaces. The near endless sequence of information makes the work virtually incomplete, hence the title Unfinished Self-Portrait. This work-in-progress is by definition reproducible and scalable to different environments, yet in each case the viewer sees an image of writing that is always partial and fragmented. Translating my own body as a stream of continuous code, the very Self becomes a cipher, the very image of meaninglessness and void distributed across disparate and unlikely environments.