寻金记｜In Search of The Gold
混合媒介：硫化钡图片，宣绒布墙纸，不锈钢，树脂3D打印，陶瓷，高清有声影像5：26min ，2024
《寻金记》的起点源于一次试图回望建成于文革期间的工业新城——上海石化总厂的发展历程的尝试。项目并不意在重建一条完整的历史叙述，而是从一个具体而边缘的空间切入：纬一路小公园。通过对这一公园的持续观察，我尝试重新感受社会主义建筑遗产中所蕴含的美学取向与对人的关照，并追索其背后可能存在的工作痕迹——它或许属于一位园林建筑师，也可能来自某种更为模糊的集体实践。以具身的方式进入这一空间，成为我接近工业、城市与人居建筑这一现代性经验的起点。
在项目推进的过程中，我不断遭遇一种停滞——缺失的档案反复将观察引向岔路。尽管小公园只是这一巨大工业体系的边缘附属，但其空间形态与构造细节中仍清晰地保留着对“人”的尺度与使用经验的尊重。对这些建筑语言的反复阅读，使我一度被引向本土现代建筑的演进语境之中：现代的、国际的、民族的，各种探索在实践中相互叠合。然而，这种关于“独特语汇”的判断始终缺乏可被确认的历史支点，它更像是在观察过程中被不断生成、又不断撤回的假设。那些未被延续的尝试，最终被随后更为剧烈的时代变迁所覆盖。
试图将这一小公园作为历史主体展开观察的过程，将我引入了一系列时明时暗的挫折之中——停滞的愿景与未能抵达的未来。小公园并未成为通向历史的入口，而是在一次次尝试中，将观察引向偏离、迟疑与无法继续的位置。
空间不再提供线索，因为每一次试图将其纳入历史叙述的行为，都过早地赋予了它意义。档案没有回应，图像无法指认作者，建筑语言在不断的比对中逐渐失去指向。 我逐渐意识到，这一场回望并不指向某个“被遮蔽的真相“。相反，它更接近一种反复发生的失败：外在的图式尽管被持续调用，却无法再次承载其原本被寄予的期待。正如涂抹在凉亭墙体上的同性交友电话，小公园依旧在这里——既未被彻底遗忘，也拒绝成为历史的确证。
在 2024 年“集美·阿尔勒发现奖”的展览现场，我将七段写作文本置于手工制作的不锈钢框中，作为一种暂时性的组织方式贯穿空间。摄影图像与文本并行呈现，它们既作为观察的记录，也作为不稳定的美学参照，共同保留了这一次漫游中断与回返的痕迹。
厦门集美艺术中心现场
In Search of the Gold originates from an attempt to look back at the development of Shanghai Jinshan Petrochemical, an industrial new town constructed during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Rather than reconstructing a coherent historical narrative, the project approaches this history through a specific and marginal site: the small park on Weiyi Road. Through sustained observation of this park, I seek to re-experience the aesthetic orientations and human-centered considerations embedded within socialist architectural heritage, and to trace the possible labor behind it—whether attributable to an individual landscape architect or to a more diffuse form of collective practice. Entering this space through embodied experience becomes my point of access to industry, the city, and residential architecture as a condition of modernity.
As the project unfolded, I repeatedly encountered a sense of stagnation. The absence of archival materials persistently diverted observation onto detours. Although the park functions merely as a peripheral appendage to a vast industrial system, its spatial configuration and constructional details nonetheless retain a clear respect for human scale and patterns of use. Repeated readings of its architectural language once drew me toward the developmental context of local modern architecture, where the modern, the international, and the national overlapped and interwove in practice. Yet any judgment regarding a “distinctive vocabulary” ultimately lacked a verifiable historical anchor. It remained a hypothesis continually produced and withdrawn in the act of observation. Those unrealized experiments were eventually overlaid by more abrupt transformations of the times.
The attempt to treat this small park as a historical subject led me into a series of recurring impasses—arrested visions and futures that were never reached. Rather than serving as an entry point into history, the park persistently redirected observation toward deviation, hesitation, and points beyond which it could not proceed.
Space no longer provides clues, because every attempt to incorporate it into a historical narrative assigns meaning to it too prematurely. The archives offer no response, images fail to identify an author, and architectural language gradually loses its referential direction through repeated comparison. I came to realize that this act of looking back does not point toward any “hidden truth.” Instead, it takes the form of a recurring failure: external schemes continue to be invoked, yet are no longer capable of bearing the expectations once invested in them. Like the contact numbers for same-sex liaisons scrawled onto the walls of the pavilion, the small park remains—neither entirely forgotten nor willing to serve as historical evidence.
At the 2024 Jimei–Arles Discovery Award, I installed seven written texts within hand-fabricated stainless-steel frames, using them as a provisional organizational structure running through the space. Photographic images and texts are presented in parallel: functioning both as records of observation and as unstable aesthetic references, they collectively preserve the traces of interruption and return that marked this wandering.
展览现场 - 公园凉亭模型
展览现场
短片《蝉鸣与六弦琴》中我邀请了一位朋友-实验即兴乐手徐程用一把50年代产于辽宁营口的六弦琴-也就是今天被称之为的“吉他”在公园中即兴演奏。黑白照片则来自于金山石化档案馆所慷慨提供的建设档案。在线性演奏的进程中，这一诞生于西方，仿制并演绎于本土的“声音”和应着金山石化乃至于本土现代工业发展的独特历史。
In the film "Cicadas and Six-String Guitar," I invited a improvisational musician Xu Cheng, to play a six-string guitar produced in Yingkou, Liaoning Province in the 1950s—what is now commonly known as a "guitar"—in the park. Interspersed with these scenes are black-and-white photographs from the construction archives provided by the Jinshan Petrochemical Archives. As the musician plays, this sound, born in the West and imitated and interpreted in China, resonates with the unique history of Jinshan Petrochemical and modern industrial development in China.
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关于《寻金记》- 策展人文本
“寻”乃探索、迂回、迷途与徘徊，是一个存在者对存在的行动；“金”，真假莫辨的指代，仅寻获者本人可以指认，一种只有在失而复得得而复失中才得以被真正淬炼与提取的意义；“记”，一种文体、形式、载具，一种对行动与意义的持存与分有。《寻金记》，因此并不能顾名思意，徐喆在这里要展示的也并不仅仅是一次寻获之旅，而这个“金”也并非只是那个沉浮在上海城市工业发展史中的“金山石化”，与乎艺术家个体与时代、集体经验之间的耦合。
早在为此端起相机之前，走进现实的纬一路公园之前，甚至在打开名为《纬一路小公园1980.10.04》的图片档案之前，徐喆与记忆主体、所忆之物，与记忆术之间的拉锯就已进行多年。并且一直以来，对于何为城市，在空间与建筑上城市是如何显影的，谁或者什么又通过怎么样的空间治理术履行和实践着自己的城市想象，以及最终，城市与空间如何在个人身体和生命上作功、铭写、蚀刻？——徐喆都有着强烈的兴趣，并在既往的创作中一再以不同方式展开探询。 这次，他返回记忆中儿时玩耍的小公园，凝视一组凉亭、一扇花架、一孔漏窗、一处池面与叠石、一束向高处退却或另一束正在下来的光……他反复进出、识别、提取，试图寻找和发现的，或许是城市历史和现实在一个如此具体的空间与物上，如何结晶和怎样结构？却遭遇了可能是中式美学的，与也许是社会主义的、现代性及其精神的黄昏时刻，并坚持用一个个体微不足道但深情的一瞥进行了某种程度的确认、悼亡，甚至圣化。
因此，你看《寻金记》，它犹豫不决，在图像与图像之外、文本与文本的增生中，互相矛盾或彼此取消的语言形式就栖身或缱绻于此间褶皱里，试图展开自身并探索四至，使相邻世界的记忆得以在不断的拱起、翘曲、突出、变形中保有持续与趋向现实的运动。 而记忆正好也不是简单反刍，不是“我藏好了，你找出来！”，不是单线程的，它多元、并置、甚至自我龃龉，是许多事实的复合和并构，是行动和生成的，是进行时的。记忆不存身过去，也非寄往将来，它就是此时此刻，属于那个不停识别着重现着的人——这个人，也是徐喆一直以来试图在创作中使之存在或显明的“那个人”。
建筑、城市、有主的生活与无主的梦，激进或客客气气的文学，诗意或沉思的自我寓言，徐喆在此的复写、重拟、反复申论，正如其录像中公园蝉鸣与那把吉他（50年代国产）的密接和应1，是即兴的，也是深思熟虑的，是铭记，也是有时或忘——“四十年的光与热不过是将眼前的一切凝结成块……”艺术之用或正在此，它从来不是对实现的预期，甚至是人类行为中惟一如此的活动，巴塔耶说它是浪费、快感与无目的的牺牲。
1. 密接和应（Stretto）：古典音乐术语。赋格主题再现时使用的技巧，即每一声部进入时不等前一声部完全结束，出现同一主题在多个声部上以一定时间和音高差叠置的现象。
--王泡泡
In Search of The Gold Text by Wang Paopao
"Search" evokes exploration, meandering, moments of being lost and wandering—an existential action of a being towards existence. "Gold" is an ambiguous reference, identifiable only by the seeker, a significance that can only be genuinely distilled and revealed in the interplay of loss and recovery. "Ji (Record)" is a genre, a form, a vehicle—a way of sustaining and partaking both action and significance. Therefore, In Search of The Gold cannot be explained by its name. What Xu Zhe aims to present here is not merely a journey of discovery. This "gold" is not simply the "Jinshan Petrochemical" that has floated in Shanghai's urban industrial development history, but also about the coupling between the individual artist's experience and that of the collective era.
Long before picking up the camera for this purpose, before stepping into the real park in Wei Yi Road, even before opening the image file named Wei Yi Road Small Park 1980.10.04, Xu Zhe had been engaged in a prolonged tug-of-war with the subject of memory, the remembered object, and the mnemonics. He is also fascinated by how cities manifest in space and architecture and who or what fulfills and practices urban imagination through spatial governance techniques. Ultimately, he wants to know how cities and spaces work, inscribe, and etch themselves on individuals' bodies and lives. All of these appear to hold significant importance for Xu Zhe, and he has always endeavored to comprehend them in his previous works. He revisits the small park of his childhood, gazing a collection of pavilions, a trellis, a lattice window, a pound surface adorned with stacked rocks, and beams of light either ascending or descending... What he consistently examines, recognizes, extracts, and seeks to uncover is the manner in which urban history and reality crystallize and are organized within a particular location and object. It confronts what could be the final phase of Chinese aesthetics, juxtaposed with socialism, modernity, and its ethos, and asserts a certain affirmation, lamentation, and even veneration through a subtle yet profoundly sensed perception of the individual.
Thus, In Search of The Gold, which hesitates, in the image and beyond image, text and proliferation of text, in which contradictory or mutually canceled forms of language inhabit or linger in the folds of the intervening space, attempting to unfold themselves and explore their boundaries, so that the memories of the neighboring worlds are able to retain their continuity and tendency to move toward to the real with a continual arching, warping, protruding, and distorting manner. Memory, fittingly, is not simple rumination, not a straightforward game of “Hide and Seek”. It is not single-threaded; it is multifaceted, juxtaposed, even self-contradictory. It is a composite and construction of many facts, active and generative, always in progress. Memory does not dwell in the past, nor is it dispatched to the future; it exists in here and now, belonging to the person who continuously identifies and reappears—this individual is also the "one" Xu Zhe has long sought to make present and visible in his creations.
Architecture, the city, masterful life and masterless dreams, radical or polite literature, poetic or contemplative self-allegory, Xu Zhe's rewriting, redrafting, and repetitive argumentation here is just like the close connection between the cicadas in the park and the guitar (domestic production in the 1950s) with stretto1 in his video, his work is both improvize and deliberate, both commemorative and occasionally forgetful — "Forty years of light and heat have merely solidified all things present into a solid mass…" The function of art may lie precisely in this: it is never an expectation of realization, but perhaps the only human activity of its kind. As Bataille says, it is a form of waste, pleasure, and purposeless sacrifice.
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1. Stretto, classical music terminology. It’s the imitation of the subject in close succession, so that the answer enters before the subject is completed. Also its a part of a fugue characterized by this overlapping.