Labour is Golden
installation | performance | 2015


Have you worked today? As a question, it is also used as a hospitable greeting embodying a revolutionary world view. Labor, job and action consist of human living conditions prior to meditation. “The reason why humans can sense new feelings at birth is that newborns have the ability of restart, namely the ability of action.”Through actions, we ourselves become a system applicable to continuous restarts and renovations, among which labor acts as the minimum action unit at that moment.

I hereby do not emphasize the concept but the group characteristic of labor. An individual could work alone, but he could never become an inde- pendent producer since all actions are indispensable from others’ presence, even such kind of presence is fictitious. In this workshop, individual identity of artists is deliberately replaced by group cooperation where all members spare no efforts in working. As the most effective golden place containing labor, action and meditation, the workshop realizes a sharing condition in a ‘worldly’ way. At the same time, it also supports production and separated production space not only belongs to a recovering place but also a place ‘where the production relationship is reproduced’. Consequently, production labor and works seem like a mirror reflecting a mass of information in a noisy, mixed or narcissistic way and a potential introspection space. However, artists can only make the exhibition hall a theater for repeated rehearsals after ceaseless subtraction and restarts. Moreover, the entire labor atmosphere may not always be simple and conversely, it may be as expected as the exhibition theme – Labor is golden. However, is it the golden millet in Miller’s Winnower or the golden mobile in the hand of upstarts?