Ni
Haifeng Ni
Statement, 1988-2017
Edition of 3 ex
Haifeng Ni
Statement, 1988-2017
Statement (1988) is part of the serial works I created in 1988. Mostly situated in disused warehouses, the works only existed as temporary installations. 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, for instance, number five. What I wanted with the number five is to repeat it so often that it appears more like an empty sign. I looked for a really meaningless language, a zero language, mathematical language was therefore an ideal choice. I then further reduced the mathematics themselves into something even more useless, into nonsense equations and fragmented symbols. In this language of degree zero, meaning is no longer the semantic contents but the act of writing itself.