Introduction of the artist:

SUI Jianguo(China)

1956  Born in Qingdao, China. Lives and works in Beijing.
Selected solo exhibitions: 2012 Sui Jianguo's Discus Thrower, The British Museum, London, UK.; 2012 Pace Beijing, 798, Beijing; 2011 The Hague Under Heaven: Sui Jianguo Sculpture, Museum Beelden aan Zee, Hague, the Netherlands; 2009 Motion; Tension: New Work by Sui Jianguo, Today Art Museum, Beijing; 2008 Revealing Traces, Joyart, Beijing; 2007 Dian Xue: Sui Jianguo Art Works, OCAT, Shanghai, China; 2005 Sui Jianguo: The Sleep of Reason, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Selected group exhibitions: 2012 7th ShenzhenSculpture Biennale, Shenzhen, China.; 2012 Arsenale 2012, The 1st Kyiv International Biennial of?Contemporary Art, Kyiv, Ukraine; 2011 The 2nd Beijing Voice: Leaving Realism Behind, The Pace Gallery, Beijing.

Introduction of works:

A Cube of Darkness, welding steel, 103.2×103.2×103.2cm, 2012

Confined Motion, metal & electric machinery, 250×250×800cm, 2011

Limited Motion, electric & machinery, 250×600×600cm, 2010

Moving Tension, steel pipes & balls, 2009

In his previous work, the Limited Action, Sui Jianguo presented a huge container (2.5 x 2.5 x 8 metres), in which an invisible iron ball rolled around striking its walls. The new installation One Cubic Metre of Absolute Darkness, has pushed the boundaries of the former to an extreme, developed within the same context. If the former provides the experience of loud noise and the movement of earth-shaking in order to imagine the object inside the container, then the latter withdraws all hints and is purely a visual narrative of ‘the unseen’. Although the use of the word ‘absolute’ in the title seems to unscientific, particularly in terms of quantum physics, it works dramatically in art.

Through this work, the proposition of ‘the unseen’ can be understood at two different levels. First, the 16 mm iron sheet shaping the cube completely blocks one’s view, and prevents any opportunity to look into the interior. Somehow, its mystery does not make its viewers despair, but instead, stimulates their curiosity, which often transforms as a kind of ‘fear’. What has been hidden everlastingly inside this iron cube in front of us is at the deepest end of the reality that we would never be able to reach. Secondly, even if we were to go through the 16 mm iron sheet, the darkness could offer us nothing to see physically, only a feeling of power and the unknown world, and the limitation and provisionality of human perceptions.

The artist reflects that, “in comparison with the darkness, as an immense sea, the illuminated places are only tiny islands”. Do we really see the ‘darkness’?  “Although we would lost our visual ability in the darkness, we can perceive its existence.” Here, a well-shaped darkness is arrested in an iron cube. It has no chance of escaping but provides no way to be seen. Ultimately, it denies our visual perception, but at the same time, leads our imagination to another infinite space.