‘All real living is meeting.’ says Martin Buber. Meeting is the one that between me and other people, and ‘I’ cannot survive without the existence of ‘It’, but if ‘I’ is only dependent on ‘It’, its meaning ceases to exist. As G.W. Hegel pointed out in his Phänomenologie des Geistes, human consciousness cannot recognize itself without the recognition of the Other. But ‘It’ is an object and an instrument of purpose for ‘I’. In this relationship, we usually have expectations, but we cannot show ourselves as we really are.
Most of the time, the human relationship is an ‘I-It’ relationship, because we often give the object a lot of social roles, but there are some moments in which one can find the pure I and treat the other as if it were the same as oneself, i.e., the ‘I-It’ relationship, which is not the norm. This kind of relationship built by the pure me is something we can’t ask for. The relationship of ‘I-You’ is also a ‘meeting’, unlike the relationship with ‘It’, which is not purposeful, nor is it an object or instrument of each other.
The two artists offer two paths of consciousness of the self from the inside out and from the outside in. Kangkun starts from the self and radiates outward thinking, so in his works, most of them are self-centered depictions. The local image of human body constitutes the main element of his sculpture works. These disturbing images are the emotions and posture that the artist is aware of when restoring the true ‘I-You’ relationship. Kong Shengqi, on the other hand, is willing to reflect on himself from an outside perspective, imagining that the ‘I’enters into the object, treating it as if it were himself, and empathizing with it, so that these symbiotic images are a combination of I and you.
Their works coincidentally choose sculpture as the main method of creation. Today, these hidden ‘Thou’ are presented to you and me in such a movable and touchable way that the soulful feeling is transformed into the substantive sense of touch, allowing us to be aware of their existence and to gaze at each other, which is a touch and nourishment to the self.
‘All real living is meeting.’ says Martin Buber. Meeting is the one that between me and other people, and ‘I’ cannot survive without the existence of ‘It’, but if ‘I’ is only dependent on ‘It’, its meaning ceases to exist. As G.W. Hegel pointed out in his Phänomenologie des Geistes, human consciousness cannot recognize itself without the recognition of the Other. But ‘It’ is an object and an instrument of purpose for ‘I’. In this relationship, we usually have expectations, but we cannot show ourselves as we really are.
Most of the time, the human relationship is an ‘I-It’ relationship, because we often give the object a lot of social roles, but there are some moments in which one can find the pure I and treat the other as if it were the same as oneself, i.e., the ‘I-It’ relationship, which is not the norm. This kind of relationship built by the pure me is something we can’t ask for. The relationship of ‘I-You’ is also a ‘meeting’, unlike the relationship with ‘It’, which is not purposeful, nor is it an object or instrument of each other.
The two artists offer two paths of consciousness of the self from the inside out and from the outside in. Kangkun starts from the self and radiates outward thinking, so in his works, most of them are self-centered depictions. The local image of human body constitutes the main element of his sculpture works. These disturbing images are the emotions and posture that the artist is aware of when restoring the true ‘I-You’ relationship. Kong Shengqi, on the other hand, is willing to reflect on himself from an outside perspective, imagining that the ‘I’enters into the object, treating it as if it were himself, and empathizing with it, so that these symbiotic images are a combination of I and you.
Their works coincidentally choose sculpture as the main method of creation. Today, these hidden ‘Thou’ are presented to you and me in such a movable and touchable way that the soulful feeling is transformed into the substantive sense of touch, allowing us to be aware of their existence and to gaze at each other, which is a touch and nourishment to the self.
