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AN INSTANT AMBIGUOUS TOOL

paraffin, clay, serissa japonica, moss, soil, roots

Each piece size：39 x 22 x 3cm

Shanghai

2021.08

portfolio

Tools are becoming more and more intertwined with us in our daily lives, and as they become more intertwined, they are becoming more and more functionally divided, a phenomenon that reinforces the barrier of indifference between man and tool. The sculptural form of the candle, as a tool, is weakening in the process of being used, as if to break the rigidity between man and tool. The preserved physiognomy raises the potential problems that exist between man and tool in existing society.

Starting with the material practice, the wax is divided into three stages of contact, aggression and inhibition as shown by the reaction with the object. Analogies are drawn with the states left behind by similar actions of people in everyday life, and this leads to an exploration of the essential meaning implied by the neglected material that exists between man and tool after life has been left behind.

The first manifestation of the instrumental nature of wax is amplified by the layers of the diary of the tool's use, which is recorded together with the user of the tool. When the wax is transformed from a tool into a work created by the recorder, it is a break with the solidified thinking about the use of tools. Secondly, as the work reappears as a tool in people's daily lives, it is a way of looking at the state of operation that is reflected in the breaking of the logjam.










This is a work that uses the candle as a starting point and as an object of study. Li Yifan divides the manifestation of candles in real life into three progressive stages of contact, attack and inhibition to encapsulate the different states of candles as they are used as tools. In this series of derivations, the researcher, as a researcher, is gradually replaced by the wax as a real entity as he dissects the layers of wax from contact to attack to inhibition, becoming the third party that is replaced. In the end the wax, which possesses a subjective consciousness, will completely leave behind the instrumental to replace him, creating a closer contact with different objects and presenting the inhibited emotions that rhinitis reacts to in him, which will continue into the final project work.

The material wax, in itself, is one of the tools of everyday life that has always existed and been mass-produced as a functional tool for illumination. The special feature of the candle is that it is an instant tool - instantly needed, instantly found, instantly used, instantly de-functionalised. In the process of use, it is always attached to any material that can be found. And thus in the search for these materials, they are usually found together.















When a candle is used, the most characteristic feature is that it exhibits a physical manifestation of flowing attachment in order not to function in any other way. The discussion of a narrow idea of how an object should properly be used is a discussion that is full of mean-spirited demands that arise from the institutional framework of how objects are used, how they are properly associated with objects, and how they serve a purpose.

In fact, all these objects combined with the candle have been used or discarded before. Yet when the candle has finished burning, the materials exhibit arrangements and functions that are either too abbreviated or too exaggerated to become a fixed language in their own right. The new images produced in the event, stripped of the linguistic context of its own existence, thus appear too isolated to fully express the functional interpretation of this material for lighting, insulation and reinforcement in practical applications.










It is precisely because they fulfil the obligations of functional instruments that they are stripped of the immediate 'sculptural bodies' implied by their actual functional usability in a process of transformation of their true meaning, representing the suppression of their function. The spontaneous creation of debilitated entities on the way to use raises questions not only about the utility of things, but also about their potential impact. This question crosses the long-established line of indifference between the actual and the devices we use to control our world, into a melancholic ambiguity.

Thus, its 'sculptural' function seems to enhance the visibility of the activities we inhabit. Extracting the component and isolating it to see how it reveals itself after leaving behind all practical meaning. Tell us how it operates in the larger system to which it belongs.


The literature is supported by references to the sculptures of Bat-Ami Rivlin and critical essays on his sculptures by Mira Dayal.

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