In Conversation With Hans Ulrich Obrist

In Conversation With Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2018

From Critical Mass And Expansion Field, Changsha Museum of Art, Changsha, China, 2018

HUO: You know, you’ve been to China many times and I always remember the amazing installation of ‘Asian Field’ in Guangzhou in 2003, but I thought that it would be interesting to start today to really focus on your history in China before we talk about the present show. Please talk a little about your previous experiences and your first trip to China.

AG: Well, that was in 1995, at the invitation of the British Council. I had explained to them, actually, about three years earlier, that I was keen to make a version of ‘Field’ for every continent and would like to make one for Asia. They eventually, kindly sent me over to China in ‘95. I remember I stayed at the Sheraton Hotel on Ring Road 3 in Beijing. I had ordered a bicycle and my first memory of China was cycling in the morning mist in towards Tiananmen Square in this multi-lane highway in the company of hundreds and hundreds of other bicycles. Two strong memories of that journey to the Forbidden City remain. One was watching an old lady carrying a set of maybe eight or ten eggs, beautifully bound together by grass, crossing on foot this eight-lane highway where there were no traffic lights. It was just very beautiful, the way that the bicycles, lorries and cars allowed her to negotiate her passage: the shoal of the bicycles separated in order to let her pass. The way that this old lady, with her delicate burden of eggs held out in front of her like a walking stick was allowed across this massive road, suggested grace and collective concern. The other memory of that first encounter was the sound of chisels hammering high in the air at the beginning of the high-rise explosion. There were cast concrete cores and floors of buildings, 20, 30, 40 storeys high everywhere. The air was full of this metallic sound of metal against concrete, chipping away. Those were my first impression of city life in China.

I had come from Tokyo, and I remember arriving at Beijing airport, which was, in those days, a Japanese-style building perhaps of the 1920s, with metal-framed windows. Suddenly I felt ‘I am in Asia’. Something about the smell; the way that people were happy to touch each other. I had come from Japan where people are so respectful of each other’s personal space. Arriving in Beijing airport there was this jostling crowd of very lively people, shouting: the whole level of sensory experience went up.

I went straight to Jinan in Shandong Province to look at possible ceramic factories as sites for the making of ‘Field’. That trip didn’t produce our eventual partners. That happened through meeting Zhang Wei, who has since become important in the evolution of art in China. She became the project leader, installing the work in subsequent shows. Her absolutely indomitable spirit, going around brick factories all over China from Guangdong to the North, looking at clay quality and looking for the right conditions, was central to the work’s success. We had to be able to accommodate up to 500 people sitting together to make the pieces. We needed somewhere that could dig and prepare over 100 tonnes of clay, but also be the location of people with whom we could collaborate. Anyway, with Zhang Wei’s help we found this village, Xiangshan village in Huadu district, Guangdong Province on the Pearl River. That process started in the late ‘90s and we found our way by 2001 or so.

HUO: Yes, because that’s also the period when I actually ventured out to China. In ‘96, we went with curator Hou Hanru to Guangzhou for the exhibition ‘Cities on the Move’ at that time. We were also involved with architect Rem Koolhaas and we were all shocked by the sudden mutation of cities. We actually went to Guangzhou with Hou Hanru and he could barely find the house of his parents, he hadn’t been there for a year and the city had just changed so much. It was in this context of incredible mutation of cities that you realised the extravaganza of ‘Field’ with Zhang Wei, which changed the rules of the game because, of course, you had to build tens of thousands of figures, made by local communities.

AG: Yes, you call it an extravaganza, but it was quite logical that the ‘Asian Field’ had to be as large, in proportion to the continent. The basic concept of the ‘Field’ project is to take the earth beneath people’s feet, allow them to touch it, shape it, and, in the process to find a form unique to each maker. So, this action of repeatedly taking a handful of clay, squeezing it, or patting it (everybody had their own way) - to make a bodyform - was a sort of meditation. The repeated action becoming a kind of mantra. At first, your collaborators are anxious to please. They say, ‘Is this what you want?’ and I reply, ‘No, it’s not about what I want, it’s about what you find. You’ve got to find your form and just trust your body, trust the process’. Anyway, it’s a beautiful thing, three generations of people working together, teaching and inspiring one another. We always work with three generations, so if a family is involved, the grandparents, parents and grandchildren will all be dispersed amongst the emerging field. You might have a granny sitting next to a grandchild, but it won’t be their own grandchild and they support one another. It’s a collective act of generation, a democratic process that happens when you bring people together like that. They all come from different backgrounds and occupations. Some had been intellectuals who, during the Cultural Revolution were sent to the country and then stayed; some were peasants, some shopkeepers, some were artists: we had 50 art students from the Guangzhou Academy. So, it was a conversation, carried through clay between different generations and people with very different life experience. I think of it as a kind of reservoir, there were many, many, many feelings released by and released into this work. We wanted capture not only the feelings of the makers, but also the feelings of people who would later view the piece. That’s why we had these big response boards. When we showed it in Guangzhou, it was a big wall; on Tiananmen Square in the National Museum of the History of the Revolution we had an even bigger one. The different reactions of the public were touching and revelatory and very much part of the show. To some it was an alien invasion, to others it was exactly what they remembered about national conscription and having to do military exercises at school. There was a lot of feeling about the one-child policy, there was a lot communicated about the feelings of alienation through indoctrination. I mean, the reaction to the making and the looking was wide and powerful.

In the end, we made three separate publications on the development of the ‘Asian Field’. One was just called ‘Field’, which covered the making part of the project; the next was called ‘Makers and Made’, a series of photos of the makers, where each maker was invited to choose one of their figures, and we paired them. The third was the reactions to the ‘Field’, a white book in which reproduced the public’s responses. This was my first experience of art as a bridge to allow repressed thoughts about the past to become visible, shareable, evident. It is, yes, a continuing concern, true of this show. Here in Changsha we had some interesting extreme political reactions to the kneeling and head-bent figures of ‘Critical Mass II’, which are in the entrance hall underneath the glass dome in the form of the ‘Sun of the Revolution’. Some of the organisers interpreted this as a reference to atonement; a body posture associated with public criticism during the Cultural Revolution. These memories are deep and sometimes painful. It was felt that it could be seen as an insult to the Revolution and could cause offence. Anyway, I refused to move the head-bent work but turned the kneeling one on its back.

HUO: But to return to our journey, after this incredible installation of ‘Field’, what were the next steps in China?

AG: After making the ‘Field’ it toured China, from Guangzhou to Beijing, and then to Shanghai and Chongqing. During that tour, obviously, I saw other parts of China and separate from the exhibition visited Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan. For each ‘Field’ exhibition, I collaborated in every site with young artists who helped with the installation, but also ran the workshops and discussions around the piece. That was all in the early 2000s. Then, I suppose, my next experience of China was making a show with Galleria Continua and Mario Cristiani, who’s sitting next to me now. This was my first one-man gallery exhibition and was at 798, with Galleria Continua in spring 2009, seven years later.

We showed ‘Another Singularity’, an environment made of silk-covered bungee that you could walk through. Whenever you passed one of the strings, it vibrated, and that vibration went through the whole space. I also showed ‘Aperture’, ‘Feeling Material’ and a ‘blockwork’. It was incredible to see how that old armaments factory, 798, had become with the Ullens Center, such a focus for art, artists and galleries.

HUO: You had worked with earth with ‘Field’ but then you had an exhibition in 2016, which I happened to see, which was a very radical show, called ‘Host’. It is interesting because Duchamp talked about the host, the guest, the ghost, and in this second solo exhibition at Galleria Continua in Beijing you flooded it, actually, I remember the flooded central space, with about ten inches of water.

AG: No, it was 23 centimetres, so 100 tonnes of seawater brought from the Tianjin Sea and 100 tonnes of mud brought from central China. It was an alchemical meeting of the inland continent with its periphery in the site of art, making this very large watercolour: the transposition of a landscape. On the one hand it was totally natural and on the other, completely artificial. The idea was to recall the memory of ‘Field’. Both works were internalisations of the elemental world. ‘Field’ is earth that has been touched, passed through fire and made into 210,000 small body forms to make a landscape of conscience and memory. ‘Host’ is untouched clay that has been passed through water to form its own landscape and reflect the architecture around it.

HUO: I think it was Georges Didi-Huberman who once said, ‘Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde.’: ‘What you see, looks at you,’ and then he describes the Hans Holbein piece in Basel (’The Dead Christ’) and you look at this painting and the painting looks at you. Also, you imagine, actually, yourselves to be in the sarcophagus, so it’s the active and the passive view that Huberman describes. It’s something you have caught in the ‘Field’ already, and then you have it again, very strongly, in ‘Host’, where basically the viewer becomes the viewed. Can you talk to me a little about that?

AG: Yes, this is a very important strain in the work. A reversal of roles, so that the viewer is in some senses witnessed by the object, or there is an implied reflexivity. With ‘Host’, this is because of the mirroring of the water and an idea of the unformed. The references are obviously to the ‘Rückenfigur’ of Caspar David Friedrich, but also to Rothko and the monochrome. This is a self-formed landscape, because underneath the reflective surface of the water is a self- aggregated mineral settlement. It looks like an un-walked-on planet, like the surface of Mars, or the surface of the moon prior to the Apollo mission. ‘Field’ was touched earth that talked for those that don’t have a voice: the dispossessed, the unborn as well as the dead, those literally without mouths to speak. These ‘grounds’ make us think about our own being as thinking, feeling, willing, intelligent animals. ‘Host’ invites us to think of what our presence signifies in elemental terms, to think again about our reliance and influence on this planet. If there is a content to the work, it comes from the projection, the active contemplative position of the viewer in the coproduction of meaning.

HUO: Now, I was browsing through an old conversation between us and you told me in 2008 that immersion was the most important single thing at that moment. To go from a concern with object to the concern with fields, feeling, how it feels. This is like art aspiring to the condition of music. We have a completely seamless relationship between proprioception and context. Can you talk a little bit about your notion of immersion and the relationship between the notion you use a lot - proprioception and context?

AG: Well, I think I want to discuss two contexts. One is site and the other is the internal imaginary of the viewer. I completely reject any notion of self-referentiality in art. Therefore, the site or the place of the arising of art has to be acknowledged on two mutually dependent factors. One is, yes, the conscious and feeling ability of the viewer, and the other is the framing or the site that the art happens in.

I start with a diagnostic attitude to the opportunity of an exhibition, which has nothing to do with putting objects in rooms. It is more like dousing, trying to divine - asking ‘what is this place?’ A place is not simply its topography or walls, it’s also its history, its social context, and its materiality. With ‘Host’, the capability of having these three levels of observation, ground and two floor levels, allowed the building to be an instrument of the observation of its own contents and gave the form of the work. The economy of factory architecture has a beauty that we all respond to: nothing extra there in the urgency of making a shelter for work to happen. That’s the wonderful alliance between an artist’s work and the residual spaces of a post-industrial society.

I felt something similar with this exhibition when I was shown the old Mao Memorial Museum. They had begun the reconstruction and I said, ‘Just stop now’. They’d taken out all of the suspended ceilings, they’d removed most of the floors, and there was just something really telling about this hiatus. Anyway, to go back to the idea of immersion, there are signals that you have to give an approaching public that the atmosphere, materiality and construction of the site is itself significant. The best way to do it is to have no signage and so alert people to the fact that they should make their own way, both intellectually but also physically through a space. This is more than suiting a work to its location; it is a matter of making the site integral to the work so that content and context are seamless - this invites the viewer to enter into the work, using their own memories and associations as raw material to construct the art.

So, coming to Changsha and being shown in this museum on the old site of the Communist Party of China Hunan Committee building, built in 1969 at the most violent part of the Cultural Revolution. It is an extraordinary construction in terms of its materiality, like 798: cast concrete floors and ceilings, brick walls, steel framed windows. But surrounding this is a very telling, crude garden construction, which with concrete, rocks, ponds, and trees, internalises the elemental world in the manner of a Japanese garden. Anyway, clearly connected to something that I was trying to do with ‘Host’. With the large windows giving onto that closed garden courtyard and high windows on the outside for light, but no outlook, this building, in its state of deconstruction, was a perfect metaphor for the position of China globally. I felt that this was a strange and precious moment for the building that seemed to suggest the potential of another cultural revolution both internal and global, very different from the last, and that the hiatus in the building could be used as a kind of hinge. The immersion then is about catalysing this potential and allowing the viewer to listen to the building through the objects that are in it and the way that they talk about Utopia and Dystopia, the rise of new China with its mega-built environment and its position in the world.

HUO: But the main work in the show, ‘Critical Mass II’, was previously seen at the Long Museum in Shanghai. It is a piece that has been very much present in Europe but here is seen for the first time in China. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit more about the epiphany of ‘Critical Mass’ in the mid- 90s? Why I was asking you earlier about your first trips to China is because ‘Critical Mass’ was made in Europe at the same time as your first trip to China, in the mid-90s, no?

AG: Quite right. Yes.

HUO: These sixty life casts of ‘Critical Mass’. Can you tell me a little bit about them, because I think it’s an incredible coincidence that it’s made at the same time?

AG: I remember very strongly, my first visit to the Forbidden City and seeing those ancient iron vessels to hold fire-fighting water as you come into the courtyards, either side of the stairway. They’re very large vessels, about 1.4 metres high and maybe bigger in diameter. Made of cast iron, with this clarity of surface that shows how it was cast. The joint lines being very clearly left almost as a surface decoration. Anyway, I’ve always been powerfully moved by the Chinese use of iron as an artistic material. They were able to cast ductile iron, what we call austenitic iron, 2,000 years before we’d rediscovered it in our industrial revolution; the potential to change the graphite molecular structure of your iron from crystalline, therefore, very brittle to something bendable.

Anyway, ‘Critical Mass’ was made for the Remise in Vienna and was actually paid for by the Viennese cultural department. It was an attempt to bear witness to the industrialisation of war, but also to carry on my long investigation of the language before language: the syntax of basic body positions. In taking twelve positions and casting them each five times, I was able to play around with them and understand how the reading of posture is entirely dependent on orientation. I’m still playing that game. I’ve learnt a lot more here in Changsha. Very interestingly, in order to avoid irrelevant association and misunderstanding, I had to turn the position number seven that was originally underneath the Sun of the Revolution (made of glass in the central hallway of the former Mao Museum) on its back and placed it fourth in the line. It therefore changes from a position which in Elias Canetti’s system of body posture is one of supplication, into the Arch of Hysteria: a body balancing on the back of its heels and the back of its head.

Anyway, I guess I was interested in two things. One was to make a work of multiple parts that seemed to reference the time of mechanical reproduction and the loss of aura, that was expressed by allowing its industrial multiple production to be evident (you could see the joint lines very clearly, again, inspired by China) and the casting knobs or buttons. We put those buttons on every piece, in order to help with the casting and have places to attach risers for the molten metal to rise up in and indicate that the mould is full.

‘Critical Mass’ plays on tensions between individual and mass through a meditation on body posture, the variability of the reading of body posture removes any singularity and attendant aura from the object. There are many themes in the work and it is highly adaptable; open to multiple arrangement and interpretation. Fundamentally, it asks, ‘what is a sculpture, what is a human being?’ In doing so, it interjects into the structure of the work, a dialectic between a utopian idea of human perfectibility and our attachment to violence and, therefore, to dystopia.

HUO: You sent me this amazing drawing or diagram where one can see all these different postures, different forms of different positions. There are foetal positions that become an ascent. But there is also the fall. In a way, it’s very performance-driven. You once told me that all of the work is performance, because it starts with an event, but it’s not about the public sharing of the event, it’s always about the trace and the indexical register of a relatively small, intimate event. So, it would be great to hear a little bit more about to what extent these sculptures are indexatory in relation to events, and how they might be performative in events. Could you explain the layout of positions in this amazing diagram you emailed me last night and the complete overview of the work?

AG: These are the twelve body postures of ‘Critical Mass’, now, in a sequence as you read it in Changsha and you can see that, exactly as you say, the first is looking at the ground, and the last at the sky. The Arch of Hysteria is in position number four. That was in position number seven, which is now the awakening position or the sitting up bodyform. If you turn the page clockwise, you begin to see that all of these things can be read rather differently, five of these positions are very purposefully turned. The awakening (sitting up) position becomes a kind of head-banger that contradicts the right angle of the architecture that contains it. The Arch of Hysteria becomes the supplicant. The one lying on its back with its knees bent becomes the king in Canetti’s system; the one that stays still but causes events to happen. I’m loath to give this rather epistemological interpretation to something that is actually playful, affective and fluid. I want the work to work in terms of how it makes people feel.

Anyway, the diagram of the twelve is the sequence that we see in the ground plan of the Changsha distribution of works. The first position is on the left and the stargazer is on the right, with the sitting up figure now in the centre of the hall. If we count the spaces clockwise, space seven has the dystopian pile. This, while being an anti-monument evoking the victims of war and violence, was also a way of saying a sculpture, even if it looks like a statue, is just a thing in the world, with its own dead weight, its own mass. It’s a statement about the materiality of sculpture but also something else. In Vienna at the Remise it read as a statement about the Holocaust. It references human history wherever it is - like a poultice gathering the dark liquid residues of tragedy and underlining the fact that we have not overcome the animal desire for settling disagreements through violence.

What I was able to do here in Changsha, for the first time really because of the distribution of the spaces, was to deconstruct the work in a way not attempted before. So, the fifth space to the left, the one on the left-hand top corner, has five suspensions on their own, making a statement about gravity, suspended fall and torture in a very stark way, whereas the five suspensions high up in the vaulted ceiling of the Long Museum perhaps seemed more about the circus.

In the next room I was able to do a version of an early work from 1993, ‘Testing a World View’ (now in the Tate Collection) with the four other awakening position pieces: sitting up against the wall, casually resting on head and toes, head- banging the wall, and the last, fixed very high up. The final room has four of the body postures that I associate with different spiritual traditions: One in a position of meditation in a Daoist or Buddhist mode leans against the wall. The praying one that faces into the wall on the right. The first ground-looking one, the Sajdab (the third position in the Muslim sequence of prayer) deliberately faces Mecca. The fourth position is the rationalist, atheist ‘witness’ position that we have seen often, throughout the installation.

In distributing the work, it was really exciting to be able to do things that I hadn’t done before. For example, next to the ‘Testing a World View’ room is the stargazer on his own in a central position: a sole work in a single space that brings a sublime element to the whole.

You know, the show is asking Joseph Beuys’s question: ‘What is art? What is a man?’ Maybe, in asking those two questions together, we can begin to make a future, or the possibility of a future. I think the resonance, for me, about this museum was that it was constructed in the memory of a man who, perhaps, singularly, more than any other person in revolutionary history, changed the lives and contexts of a very large number of human beings. You know, those questions are particularly resonant in a building that was built in the time of a very destructive cultural revolution.

In this show I’ve put ‘Critical Mass’, or mass that is critical to quest, in relation to ‘Expansion Field’, another progression. The idea for that piece is simple: to apply the Hubble Constant, or the principle of the expansion of cosmic space, to bear the position of the individual through the use of an architectural language. The ten ‘Expansion’ works progressively expand lived and constructed space, starting at 150 millimetres and ending at 700 millimetres from the surface of the body.

HUO: I know that because it was the subject of our last conversation in Switzerland at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. In Bern, there was whole survey of the ‘Expansion Field’ sculptures, constructed in Corten steel. What is so interesting is that this series connects with ‘Critical Mass’ in terms of the different postures of the human bodies.

AG: Yes, they do. The two sequences, the line that mirrors the Darwinian so-called ascent of man, also tips a nod to the introduction in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s 900 theses, the ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’. Here is a parallel matryoshka doll linear progression involving space, not mass. ‘Critical Mass’ is mass in human form about ten times the density of a living body in iron. In this linear ‘Expansion Field’, a sequence of architectural spaces contains quanta packets of darkness at an incrementally larger scale. This is just a meditation on the relation between inner mental space and outer, cosmic space. This is the one part of the museum that has no windows; it feels to me like the necropolis of the sacred bulls in Saqqara in Egypt, which I visited in 1969: it has a very mortuary feel, which it certainly didn’t have in Bern. It asks, ‘What is a human habitat? What is necessary, now, for the protection and continuation of the human project?’ A serious questioning of the economic model of endless consumerist expansion. What you described, I experienced in Guangzhou - the massive destruction of very beautiful clan-style buildings, without any appreciation of their deep cultural significance. They were replaced with high-rise buildings that are everywhere in Changsha. Asking the question, ‘What is a human?’ in terms of both body and space, ends up with asking what is a human environment, and what is this world that we are making out of an inherited earth, and who is in control of it?

HUO: Two or three last questions: What these series all have in common is that they have to do with the human figure. I wanted really to clarify, particularly, because it’s a new exhibition, that although about measure, the work is not about man as the measure of all things, it’s about indwelling within an organism. You said that it was, actually, less the modulor of Corbusier and more about that Michelangelo marble sculpture which you saw at the Hermitage of the crouching boy. I wanted you to explain it, because it’s politically very powerful to make clear that it’s not about the humanist idea of man being the measure of all things.

AG: I’m glad that we are touching on this. I think, yes, for me, the most important thing is that there is no idealisation and no ideology. To go back to the performative and the indexical: all these works stem from the register of a particular body, in a particular position, at a particular time. Either mass pitted against space or space captured and isolated, but always in reference to a body that it both is contained by it and contains it. All the bodyforms are examples of the only bit of the material world that I happen to dwell inside. The works are indexical proof of the existence of a human body, an exemplary particular, neither idealised nor emblematised. The performative element of its making, if we call it that, is a return to the idea of the body as a place of indwelling, rather than the object of idealisation, either in aesthetic or political terms. Neither the hero, nor the sexualised ideal female body. In the same way as ‘Host’ and ‘Field’ invite us to rethink our relationship with incarnation, these residual proofs of a moment of lived time invite us to reoccupy them imaginatively and look, as if for the first time, at what the body is. This is a question and it’s not about any kind of mean. I’m very interested in the notion of measure, but not as an absolute. So, no Napoleonic code, but also no imperial code. I’m saying that the body is our found object and it perhaps isn’t primarily an object at all, it’s a place that can become an event if we allow it to be. I guess that’s what I want from my participant viewers. I want an active, alert, moving body; a thinking, feeling, moving being through a space that has been acknowledged as part of the show, to sense themselves empathically occupying these bodily displacements, or boxes, in the case of the ‘Expansion Field’. Just like Gerhard Richter, I reject ideological determinism.

HUO: I mean, that is a wonderful conclusion to this interview. I had a last question because, as you know, I always ask about your unrealised projects, because we know so much about artists and realised projects but, actually little about unrealised ones. The real reason I’m asking about even very well-known artists’ unrealised projects is so that we can learn about something that could possibly happen. There are ones that are too big or too small - forgotten, lost competition entries etc. Doris Lessing once said to me, ‘just think, there’s a whole range of possible people out there who could help to make them real’. I wanted you to tell us your dreams of unrealised projects in China. Whether Utopian or not, because, maybe, some of our readers might help them to be realised.

AG: Well, the last time we talked, I shared my dream to use the united armies of NATO, Russia and China to build a 21st century Pantheon under the deserts of central Asia. I will tell you, now, about my slightly less megalomaniac but still unrealised project that in my mind would suit China. I want to make an enterable but non-functional building in human form, 100 metres or more high, out of bricks taken from all over the country. One of the beautiful facts about Chinese culture is the universality of the brick, which has evolved in time. A Song brick is very different in size and colour from a from a Ming brick, and the development of brick making is unmatched in size and sophistication in any other culture that I know. If you see the great bricks of the walls of Nanjing, that are maybe 400 by 200 by 100 millimetres, they are exquisitely made. They are water-fired to produce a wonderful lucid grey colour. All the bricks in China have different compressive and tensile capabilities, and what I want to do is build, by hand, a hollow standing bodyform. This idea was originally conceived for site in Northern England, but I think it makes much more sense in China. I would like every brick to carry the name of its maker and I would like there to be as many makers as possible. I would like the bricks to carry any message, any thought, any feeling. Obviously, those would be lost for as long as the work stands - lost within the mortar of the construction. The bricks would have to have to be punctured by a series of holes. We’ve done the engineering on this, and it’s very achievable. You use rods that are easily handle-able by a single man or woman about one to two metres long, twenty millimetres in diameter that are passed through the bricks. Making a kind of basket weave allows the structure to be strong and even earthquake-proof. Anyway, that’s my idea: to make this tall, entirely void body that you could walk into through a door in the back of the heels. You would enter through a light lock and then stand in almost complete darkness, only illuminated by two windows at each ear, about 100 metres above your head. The light would filter through the oculus of the neck: you would stand in very minimal light, those ear-holes being less than a metre square. You would have to acclimatise to the low light levels. Acoustically, this would be very live. Essentially, you would be standing in a void body-space made from the earth. All of the bricks that went into the building would be analysed for their strength, and placed where they could withstand the necessary force. They would subtly change colour and materiality as the work rose. I think from the inside you might slowly be aware of that and also, perhaps, of the scratched characters of the names of the makers that went up and away, out of sight, on the walls around you.

So that was my idea of another form of social sculpture that, in some way, continues the work begun with ‘Field’ and continues with ‘Host’. I would see it making most sense in the central business district, off Chaoyang Avenue in Beijing, in the company of other high-rise buildings. A useless building housing a vast open space for the purpose of dreaming with eyes open, in a building not built for money or work, but for the contemplation of our place on this earth and suggesting our belonging and dependency on it. A lone, earthy, organic form that sets itself in contrast to the layered and stacked orthogonality of the tall towers around it.

HUO: There could not be a better conclusion. I’m so happy to have contributed to the possibility that this project might be realised.

AG: Hans Ulrich, thank you, I’m so happy to talk to you.