Artist Statement
Qianlin’s works often propose a different world, model, or system for a better humanity. She sees the future of art to be the product that encompasses everything: a charity organisation, an academic institution, a community, a myth, a library, a university, a monastery, etc. It should have the power to transform people who join the organisation, and spread the influence to the world. It concerns and discusses the axioms of life, while is all based on this meta question for everyone: what is the adequate reason for us to accept deaths and death risks?
In her recent work Planet-003 Indoctrination Programme, she constructs an apocalyptic world in the future where most people have short-term memory loss. The ‘aliens’ took the advantage of this illness to educate humans about their ideals through changing their daily TV programmes. This imaginary world is shown on a TV within a realistic installation of a care home living room, the first location where this experiment aired. If fiction is the main method Qianlin uses to discuss social issues, then education is the string that ties all of her work together. Currently, she is developing this work to a larger scale, with a long-term goal to build a care home as a University of Values in the future. This university teaches and also is taught by its participants of what values we should have so that we can arrive at the state of what Heidegger called “authentic being-toward-death”.
Her other recent works and works-in-progress contribute to her interest in education from different angles. In Library of Non-Art, Qianlin rethinks the definition of art, and how different phenomenons can be a type of art. In Amygdalium Impressioning, she investigates how fear obstructs humans from advancing to higher consciousness through fictional performances. For the next stage, she plans to create new myths that offer insights for women, non-binary, older people, and anyone who can’t find models to follow in the old myths.