In experimental project “7 Rooms”, 2017, artist Cao Jigang and I were exploring different ways of creating dialogue between art and design, to provoke different mindsets towards Chinese painting aesthetic. Cao Jigang’s work transcends the limits of either Chinese or Western painting. He follows the legacy of his predecessors in the Chinese literati painting school while employing the egg tempera medium to depict an ultra-personal yet lonely world which he called “a deserted and desolate uninhabited place, without flowing water or blooming flower”. In response, I designed five installations as "gateways" which were intended to act as bridges between the artwork and audience, enticing the public towards the appreciation of an ancient aesthetic philosophy which "changes the way we see and bring back the classics", said curator Xia Kejun.

This space borrows its name from Mr. Cao’s painting <No Man’s Land>. More precisely, it represents my own interpretation of the painting, and its manifestation into a more tangible form according to my own perspective. Perhaps the painting represents the tumult at the beginning of time, and my installation is the no man’s land of the post-apocalyptic future.

I created a sculpture using a metal frame, from which cables are suspended to form an elaborate border in the centre of which can be found what are essentially the forms of a rib cage and spine. I made use of cables in this way as a metaphor, as they have been the primary transit medium for the majority of information being sent from place to place since the beginning of the Information Age. They are becoming the physical embodiment of an emerging technological consciousness in which information is finding its form. When we confront the question of artificial intelligence, we begin to ask ourselves, what makes a person a human being? Will it lead to our immortality, or our eventual extinction is the question No Man’s Land confronts us with, while leaving us with no more answers than we possessed before gazing upon it.