Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, “Crimes without a Scene: Qian Weikang and the New Measurement Group”
Gu Dexin, Wang Luyan, Tactile Art, 1988.
| Qian Weikang made about twelve installations and five written proposals between 1991 and 1996. After making and presenting them in largely self-mounted exhibitions, Qian disposed of his works simply because he did not have any space to store them. In 1996 he then made a deliberate decision to stop making any visual artworks, participating in any exhibitions, and socializing in art circles. In the same year, the New Measurement Group concluded their activities by trashing all of the manuscripts and related materials they had produced during their eight-year collaboration. One of the group's members, Chen Shaoping, did not make any other work from that point on, though he remained in touch with the art community. Gu Dexin, who had had a very prolific and celebrated career since the 1990s, quit all artistic activities in 2008 and limited his involvement in the art world to occasional meetings with close friends and colleagues. In 2012, when a major survey exhibition of his work was organized in Beijing, he was absent from the planning and curatorial process and did not even visit the exhibition. All of the works were loaned from collections other than his own. The only one who still maintains an active presence in the art world is Wang Luyan, who continues to make works and collect works of his fellow artists. Neither Chen Shaoxiong nor Gu Dexin had publicly discussed much of anything about the work of New Measurement. Available resources on their work remain scarce. In setting out to recreate and present works by Qian Weikang and the New Measurement Group in two parallel solo exhibitions, we found the process of trying to understand these two practices today to be like entering a crime scene stripped clean of any physical evidence. There was as much ignorance as there was mystery and myth surrounding them. It did not help that the members of the New Measurement Group had long stopped seeing each other socially. Though they all reside in the same city, the last time they sat down together to discuss their group's work with a curator was in 2008. Qian Weikang, on the other hand, had not visited a contemporary art exhibition in two decades. |
This special issue of e-flux journal is published in cooperation with Wuhan Art Terminus (WH.A.T.) and with support from REMAI MODERN Art Gallery of Saskatchewan . |
