“Idiorrhytmic: Canadian &Chinese Artists Urban Art Creation Project”

Curated by Toronto-based curator Yan Zhou and artist Xiaojing Yan.

A Canadian & Chinese artists urban public art project organized by Jiangsu Meijing Cultural Investments Ltd, Co., and supported by Suzhou Industrial Area Municipal Government as well as the Suzhou Art Museum. The artists were invited to go to Suzhou to create new, site-responsive works in various media intended to facilitate artistic and cultural exchanges between Canada and China.

The specific project jointly undertaken was a pavilion titled Six Records of a Floating Life, a reference to the autobiography of a famous Suzhou writer, Shen Fu (1763-1825) who grew up in Suzhou China. It was Yam Lau who suggested this narrative might be of interest to us. It was the dream-like quality of Shen Fu’s text that we felt was the most important consideration in the pavilion’s design. This quality is difficult to transfer to the solidity of material construction, and in that difficulty we felt lay an opportunity – to effect a transfer through reflection both as a metaphysical concept and as a physical manifestation. The solution to this puzzle lay in the reflective or mirror-like aspects of highly polished stainless steel. With the pavilion’s six-sided columns mirroring the six central star-shaped recesses – both fabricated in this reflective material – the pavilion can seem to float, as in a dream, as in Shen Fu’s life, providing the contemporary viewer a place – a sanctuary – for reflection and the integration of their own experience – their own story – into that of Shen Fu’s.