written in partnership with Jon StojanHuo Youfeng’s hand-drawn animation works records the actions on-site and express reflections on an individual’s harvesting, construction, destruction, identity, and shelter. The content of the drawings comes from a harvesting scene in Qinghai Province, China, where Tibetan farmers provided sickles, and the artist personally harvested every bundle of wild grass. This action is part of a long-term plan, with the artworks being completed on-site. The endless labor from dawn to dusk, the physically punishing self-amusement, the entire labor process is both a process of reflection and a process of harvest. Many incidental scenes suggest human uncertainty and irreversible states brought about by the environment. The survival of human beings is inevitably entangled in endless self-punishment. The transition of identity driven by desire transforms into a journey of harvest, seeking temporary security and extending endless genes as much as possible for the next migration and unknown possession… Everyone experiences many meaningless and illusory, romantic, surrealistic illusions on the path to establishing personal identity, which together constitute a process of absurd self-loss and rooted confidence in the fertile native land.
For example, the uncertainty of personal survival caused by the war in Eastern Europe in 2017 and the value conflicts and territorial migrations caused by different national attributes. For this reason, I drew many sketches, intending to use grass to build temporary shelters. This work was produced and exhibited at the Terence Art Museum in Los Angeles, with the aim of providing temporary shelter for individual identities and helpless grassroots during the exhibition period of one month. During this period, different shapes were built, destroyed, and rebuilt using each bundle of grass, triggering various topics and public interactions. True shelter is the warmth of human beings, the ultimate care of human beings. Harvesting grass and the grass itself are meaningless.
A Netherland artist Hieronymus Bosch’s work The Hay Wagon depicts people from different social classes plundering and possessing hay from the hay wagon, symbolizing people’s desires and pursuits for material wealth. This grass represents private property, and the means and results of harvesting vary from person to person. The desire expands and becomes crazy, which is Bosch’s interpretation of grass. Throwing oneself into the unknown future, feeling lost and barren, plundering grass that does not belong to oneself to seek survival. All means, lies, and fabricated beautiful identities are for material gain. This reminds me of the Great Famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933, where the inability to reflect personal social attributes under different social environments cannot reflect the possession of grass, and you are among them. Therefore, harvesting grass is also meaningless in modern society, and modern harvesting methods are more efficient. The only action he can take is to possess the gift of grass, which does not bring endless security and shelter to people; it is temporary. Action is taken to restore doubts about grass. People have no ability to protect the part they receive, and they spend their entire lives in meaningless cycles and transformations for security. What is self-identity? People fear being marginalized by the collective, and everyone constantly manifests their hormones, intelligence, and strategies. This is not to gain recognition through the results of one’s own labor to determine one’s uniqueness and irreplaceability.
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From a pile of harvested hay to another pile of hay is a process of superposition, a process of loss and gain. From one group to another, one region to another, from self-reflection to self-abandonment, from one pile of grass to another, all he can do is stack the harvested grass into small mountains and let each person who obtains the hay build their own shelter. Civilization is a person using his harvest to give spiritual pastures to those who are not accepted, lost, and cannot find the other side. The significance of mowing grass is that everyone wants to harvest good results and invest labor. In different social environments, grass cannot reflect personal value, and individuals are among them. The only meaningful thing is action. The gifts from heaven obtained by people are temporary, and people have no ability to protect the part they should have received. What is obtained is meaningless, so people spend their entire lives constantly striving for labor. These efforts cover all energy and time, abandon all life, and are devoured by labor. This issue is reflected in different regions in different ways, and my work is to obtain different senses of security from labor. In a large group, individuals disappear, and they have no identity. When constantly searching for self-identity, they will also lose another identity. The thinking and narrative interpretation of the artist’s own experience are my cognition of people and the understanding of identity. Mowing while losing and searching is the process of life. All these processes seem meaningless. In fact, they constitute a lifelong cycle of seeking security. Grass is just a medium, and everyone establishes their own identity. What kind of identity am I? People change with changes in regional environments. The work of the artist is to give meaning to seemingly meaningless things.
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