The Brooklyn Rail

The exhibition Dimensions Indefinitely Variable: Sui Jianguo 1974–2024 is an opportunity to evaluate Sui Jianguo’s contributions to contemporary art. The setting of the TAG Art Museum, completed in 2019 by French architect Jean Nouvel, integrates exterior natural environments with the quiet light of interior spaces in ways that echo and embrace Sui Jianguo’s work.

Upon entering the museum, visitors face the supersized bones of Impermanence (2006) and the rotation of the Earth-like globe in The Curse of Time (2024). Both mark Sui Jianguo’s focus on natural forces and human existence. The artworks are arranged in three groups. The first group, covering 1989 to 2007, refers to natural forces, economies, ironies of consumerism, and cultural interactions. In the second group, from 2008 to 2024, Sui Jianguo explores his primal contact with life, by squeezing out bits of clay and enlarging them with 3-D printing technologies into huge surfaces with hollows of space. Surfaces with his palm and fingerprints intertwine with the activation of a space that is essential to his eyes. The third group of works includes documents and ephemera of art-making from 1974 to 2024. An epilogue advances the idea that the surfaces and hollows are inward. In the final room, visitors themselves grasp and squeeze clay. What themes emerge from all this? What models for living contact with nature is Sui Jianguo showing to visitors? There are two models: physical interaction in linear time, and engagement with one’s own sources of touch and sight.

Joe Martin Lin-Hill, the curator, writes that the theme of time unifies Sui Jianguo’s work from 1989 to 2024. He contends that pieces from 1989 to 2006 symbolize the periods of their creation. Given Sui Jianguo’s years of squeezing clay, he argues that one outcome is a definition for being alive: creative interaction with materials over time. This provides an idea for a common human identity.

Does the theme of time give meaning to artworks made from 1989 to 2007? It does, although there are hints of sensory-contact with a present that is not in time. Earthly Force (1992–94), with stones wrapped in rebar, symbolizes nature in tension with reason in the early 1990s. The “Legacy Mantle” series (1997–2005) presents cultural interactions: Zhongshan suits in modern aluminum (1997) and fiberglass (2004), covered with playful automotive paint, symbolize a rising economy. Yet, each jacket reveals a timeless, interior emptiness for cultivation of heart. The toy dinosaurs of “Made in China” (1997–2005) point to the ironies of China’s rise into an economic dragon. In Speeding Up (2006), Sui Jianguo positions twelve video cameras to document trains testing new equipment needed to speed up railway freight. The speeding trains mark the speeding economy. But each video screen also implies a quiet visible present that is displaced during train times. On balance, linear time helps to explain what Sui Jianguo’s work is about.

The second group of works about primal human contact with life includes Long Table (2008–24). This table presents in chronological order nearly 2000 small works in clay that Sui has created by grasping and squeezing. The table begins with lumpy figures of the “Blind Portrait” series that Sui Jianguo made while wearing a blindfold in 2008–09; some monumental enlargements traveled to Central Park, New York City. The table progresses to creation of small bits of clay squeezed by fingertips. To make the squeezed bits more observable, Sui Jianguo has enlarged some by 3-D digital printing. The products include Planting Trace 1 (2013–17) in bronze, Planting Trace - Black Pearl (2023) in marble, and fifty gigantic resins comprising Cloud Mountain (2024) which floats above Long Table. This method of enlargement by 3-D digital printing is innovative. Jianguo’s fingerprints of touch intertwine with what curator Joe Martin Lin-Hill calls “emptiness made visible.” One result is a sort of synaesthesia: the fingerprints in hollows of marble or resin lead to imagining the hollows of space as inside Sui Jianguo’s fingers. Moreover, both Sui Jianguo and Lin-Hill state that empty space activated by Cloud Mountain is similar in some ways to the blank spaces in classical Chinese landscape painting, which Sui Jianguo studied from 1974–79.

Does talk about linear time and physically squeezing clay help to explain how Sui Jianguo’s art is about being alive as a human individual? It does in part. As curator Joe Martin Lin-Hill argues, Sui Jianguo repeats creative physical interactions with materials, and these acts can be cited to define a common humanity that extends back even to prehistoric times. But this events-based definition leaves unexplained Sui Jianguo’s primal contact with nature through his bodily sense of touch or sight. Moreover, the idea here—that physical contact with materials can identify the individual human being—is compelling but not new; it is a modern idea already present with Auguste Rodin, as Betti-Sue Hertz at Columbia University notes.¹

Is there a second model for human life in primal contact with nature? There is. It is provided by a second language: classical Chinese aesthetics. Joe Martin Lin-Hill incorporates this second language by using such terms as “emptiness made visible.” In classical aesthetics, Zong Bing (375–443) calls on the landscape painter to “purify thought, savor image” (chenghuai weixiang 澄櫰味象). In short, suspend visual perception and notice the image spread across your eyes. In this context, “image”(xiang象) refers to a visible surface that reveals the existence of the natural world and its forms; this visible surface is closer to actuality than language, according to Prof. Chen Wangheng at Wuhan University². (“Image” here refers to a surface context that is not perceived to exist as a physical condition.) By including empty spaces in a landscape painting of nature, the painter represents this surface in the eye that reveals the existence of the world.

For Zong Bing, the eye is like the surface of a mirror within which objects and forms come and go. Moreover, this surface in the eye belongs to a realm called “one’s own original nature.” You watch this surface in your eyes, so you think of it as a body even if it has no physical existence. So, there is a second model for living as a human individual with an interior body: watch and savor the image spread across your eyes as bodily evidence of your original naturalness. Sui Jianguo discovers this: when his enlargements make the space called “emptiness” visible in Planting Trace, Black Pearl or in Cloud Mountain, they give each visitor a chance to awaken to their own most radical embodiment as a living human being, just as classical ink paintings do. Appreciating this, the curator places Sui Jianguo’s hand-painted interpretation of a painting by Shitao (1642–1707) next to Cloud Mountain.

As an epilogue, curator Joe Martin Lin-Hill analyzes Pot 3 (video) (2024) in relation to the “emptiness made visible” in Cloud Mountain. An empty mold used in 3-D printing represents a beholder’s physical body or pot; a monitor connected to a video camera inside shows an image of an interior visible surface that is invisible from the outside. The image of the interior surface is shown in An Inside Image of the Pot (2024). By analogy, this work implies a primal contact with nature through an interior image in one’s eyes. Sui Jianguo’s achievement can be assessed by comparison with TV Buddha (1974) by Nam June Paik; it is as if Sui Jianguo places the image of the eye (the surface of the mirror) inside the Buddha figure.