Perhaps, the world we are about to be living in is indeed Baudrillard’s boundless desert of the real, evoking individual and collective concerns, accompanied by the virtual phantom of truth and wandering animals of simulacrum. Feng Zhixuan’s sculptures are not subversion of specific lives, but alienated signs of the real instead, or strange things born out of the hybrid of contemporary age, most confidently and, for long, returning our gaze. If the world along with capital and its death in Baudrillard’s prediction is indeed gradually devouring us, until we finally become animals as such, then one may say that Feng’s work portrays a kingdom which feeds itself with virtual consumptions and real fears - it is transparent and solid, parallel to us, seemingly not necessarily requiring or belonging specifically to any so-called culture, nor responsible for any historical background, calmly accepting the alienating nature of the spectacle, becoming a new spectacle.
Conjure a Compo Site describes a composite dynamic field. Formally, the whole of the exhibition could be considered as a melted public sculpture, a micro social machine, links between the hidden mechanism, internally manifested large-scale assemblage, and the architectural forms of the sculptures are tightly fastened, all faithfully seeing to the layering, spiral rules of external reception and internal consumption. Feng Zhixuan’s sculptures often use inexpensive materials, and are often transformed from a negative structure to a physical entity through casting means; then the artist adds extra materials (charcoal, quartz, powered gold, etc.) to maintain a stable hybrid state. As Feng develops his practice, he tries to turn the sculptural space inside out, reveals the internal structure and makes it a component that has to be accounted for. Stripping polyurethane foam from construction materials, Feng also eagerly and discreetly examines the accelerated contemporary society. Additionally, shots of foreign images and insertions of hybrid materials bring the sculptural works closer to the nature of the anxious society, and closer to greater complexity and instability.
All is fast and rich nowadays, devouring us in a chaotic and violent fashion. Accelerated capitalism crumbles aboriginal cultures; yet locality and the globalized condition feeds into each other in the ruins. From the lion claw foot, to a certain shell as special form of language by Kuna Yala people, these foreign culture symbols become new alienated signs upon the extensions and expansions of the internal structure. It is just like the beer foam in the exhibition, being inserted in ancient trade manners into an infinite cycle, then immediately constructs a ring of enclosed, narcissistic and mysterious spectacle. If one is to imagine that the composite spectacle forms a festive community, and by extension the ecstasy that accepts all foreign things and no reality could come forth and examine it, then we acknowledge that all realities should be possible, all fantasies are no longer fantasies. Perhaps, many years later, we are to face the mysterious world indicated by the Conjure a Compo Site, and there will be nothing left in our sight but the scene it is willing to share with us. In this circus we no longer need any Cassandra’s voice.
