Text by Wang Jing
The integration of social practice and research work has always been aprominent aspect in Xu Tan's artistic creation. This presentation juxtaposes his multi-channel video Made at Home in China, created in the 1990s, with several videos from the Egret, Please Stay, Let's a Heart-to-Heart Talk project, which is currently ongoing.
The "Egret" project consists of videos of Xu Tan's face-to-face interviews with fifteen peopledisplaying symptoms of depression from 2021 to 2022, and new rounds of related dialogues that are taking place in situ within the exhibition space structured by these video images. The artist intends for the project to possess a certain research character –not as a discipline or as therapy but something more socially oriented; for him, it is more important to build a bridge between the so-called normal society and these "symptomatic" people so that they can be more visible and cared for.
Made at Home in China, created in 1997, was Xu Tan's first video work (quad-channel). At the time, he had just acquired his first video camera and used it to record the daily lives of various people in his neighborhood in a "semi-interview style". This work also laid the foundation for his use of video as a medium for exploring social research in the next thirty years.
On the one hand, the orientation between conceptual images and documentary films is perhaps a visual characteristic shared by Made at Home in China and the "Egret" project. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, both projects reflect Xu Tan belief that an understanding of each specific person in society is crucial to understanding society itself. For example, the former documented a few individuals striving for physical liberation after the reform and opening-up period, while the latter focuses on the group of people who are suffering today. If the former mainly used the camera to capture the (historical) situation of some individuals, the latter involves deep conversations with each of them, triggering the artist's own deep and painful "thought spasms," which have been gradually pushed into the public dimension of the inter-subjectivity by his repeated conversations/interactions with the people around him (including the interviewees) over an extended period.
The subject exists not as an object of any science or discipline: it is not addressed by a certain kind of knowledge, but, to a greater extent, shaped by practice, and subjectivity is never detached from social connections. Thus, from the perspective of generating an event rather than a work of art, compared to "Made at Home in China," whose “meaning” can be seen as its own "cause," the "Egret" project is a clear manifestation of the tension between cause and meaning in terms of logic and order, i.e., artistic creation driven by an ethical cognition of "wanting to understand them better" cannot be merely oriented towards aesthetic, conceptual discussions but is more concerned with the social reality of the subject…
文 | 王景
对将社会实践与研究性工作的融合，一直是徐坦艺术创作的一种核心倾向。此次呈现并置了他于90年代创作的《在中国的家里制造》多频录像和目前正在发布的《白鹭、请留下，让我们谈谈心》项目其中的几个视频。
“白鹭”项目主要包含了从2021至2022年徐坦与十五位抑郁症状者面对面采访的视频以及于这些影像结构的空间中正在发生的新一轮相关对话现场。艺术家希望该项目具备某种研究性——但不是作为学科的也不是作为治疗的，于他而言，更重要的是在广大的所谓正常社会人群和这些“有症状”的人群之间架起一座桥梁，让他们更多地被看到、被关切。
拍摄于1997年的《在中国的家里制造》是徐坦第一件录像作品（四频）。他当时拥有第一部摄像设备，并使用它“半采访式”地记录了一些周边各式各样人们的日常生活片段。这个作品也奠定了他之后的接近三十年，基本上都使用录像作为探索社会研究性创作的媒介。
一方面，介于观念影像与纪录片之间，也许是《在中国的家里制造》录像与“白鹭”项目在视觉上共享的特点。另一方面，更重要的，徐坦认为对社会里每个具体的人的理解是对社会的一种很重要的理解。比如，前者记录了当时改革开放后挣扎于身体解放的少数人，后者则聚焦于现如今正在遭遇痛苦的人群。如果说前者主要使用了镜头捕捉到一些个体的（历史性）处境，后者则深入地与每个人对话并引发了艺术家本人深刻且痛苦的“思想痉挛”，之后的很长时间里，也逐渐地被他在与周边人（包括被采访者）的反复交谈/交往中推至主体间的公共维度。
主体的存在不是任何科学/学科的对象：它不是由某种知识、更是由实践来触及的，主体性从来都不会解绑于社会联结。因而，从更（生成）事件性而非寻求作品性的角度，相较于《在中国的家里制造》这件影像的“意义”某种程度上可以被视作它本身的“原因”， “白鹭”项目则很明显地体现了原因与意义在逻辑与秩序上的拉扯，即驱动于一种“想要更理解Ta（们）”的伦理性认知的艺术创作当然不能导向仅仅围绕审美的、概念的讨论，而更关乎主体的社会性现实……