Dia:Beacon, as a start.

I want to start with the trip.

Then the show.

Walt De Maria

Michael Heizer

Donald Judd

Sol Lewitt

Gerhard Richter

Robert Ryman

Fred Sandback

In the first few minutes when we started the tour with the curator, I did not have strong feeling of involvement; Walter De Maria’s Silver Meters looks no more than just interesting ideas with strong executive ability. However, with the tour going, when all the artworks started overlaying as a whole space, I can feel the extraordinary harmony and power in this exhibition. In this way, Dia: Beacon is definitely the best exhibition could explain the idea “experiential” I’ve even been.

Although most of the works delivered a kind of neutral visual expression, I get the idea of “anti value” behind them, and also a deeper critical concept. At a certain point, I felt like I want to grab my brain out of my head, and through it away, since I can’t bear that my sensory playing with my intellect. That is the time I forced myself to stop thinking about anything, or what it really is, and the whole space start to shift. Even if I ‘ve seen Richard Serra’s piece in LA, but the experience is totally different from that time, I was looking up following the edge between the installation and the ceiling, and really trying to feel how this piece work with the building, everything else became unimportant at all. I can feel my existed observing system and empiricism is breaking in the space, and can’t stop thinking about “Never trust your own eyes, believe what you are told.”

That was when the politics involved.

As an audience, when I realized my eyes cheated my intellect, I doubt if I really see what I wanted to see. At the same period some of these artworks were created, the artists on the west coast spare no effort to protest on civil rights, wars, and social problems in lots of their artwork, to tell people how the other side looks like. I was wondering if the same intention was hiding somewhere behind these relatively abstract “simplicity” artworks? If so, it is not just to implant a different aspect to subvert what people used to think, but a new way of thinking to make people doubt about what they believe they know.

In this way, it is still neutral, because it affecting the vision on both side of any conflict.