Fat - Tea - One Fen
The Choices and Production
2017
Fat - Tea - One Fen was produced at TCG Nordica as an Artist in Recidense. It was showed at the Exhibition "Artists Roles / Artists Rules II" in Kunming China. Here I will show and describe some of the choises made during the production.
The exhibition was the result of an art exhange project between :
gallery Studio44 in Stockholm ( where part one was exhibitied) and TCG Nordica cultural centre in Kunming.
Participating artists from China: Lei Yan, Luo Fei, Zi Bai and Xue Tao
Perticipating atists from Sweden: Rikard Fåhraeus, Madeleine Aleman, Jannike Brantås and Ylva Landoff Lindberg.
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" Artists Roles / Artists Rules is an exhibition on the artist’s mission, responsibility, duty and position in society- sometimes enforced, sometimes self-imposed. Each artist has worked individually from a personal standpoint on an individual basis as well as with the vision of how things ideally could be. "
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The basic concept that this Art-piece is dealing with is that of money, and on a deeper level that of Value.
In the Artist community the question of money is considered to be OK when it comes to talking about “survival issues” but not so when it comes to discussions about the Art itself. There is also the myth of the poor Artist working for a higher cause to consider. As if it actually would make the Art and the Artist better if there was a lack of money. This lack supposedly heightens the Artistic (or/and Moral ) Value.
The choice of Tea and Poppy oil.
Tea, and in this case specifically Pu'er Tea, is very Chinese, and certainly something culturally connected to Yunnan.
Tea has also other connections to Art. Both Tea and Art are given their value based on “Taste” and Scarcity as well as the evaluation by a few prominent persons.
Moreover Tea is meant to have mind altering values, even if mild. The same could be said about Art. A more potent substance in this aspect would be Opium which could be said to represent the other end of a scale.
Oil as such sticks to the fingers, leaves greasy marks and ingesting to much will make you fat and sick. A reference to how the dealings with money is viewed upon.
The choice of which bank-note to make.
However tempting it might have been to make a fake high value Renmin just for the sake of making an argument I did choose to make the lowest there could be: one Fen. The reason is among others just that, the low value, and its relation to the value of the artistic work as well as the monetary value of time and materials used. The fact that if something is labelled as Art it´s value rises, no matter what is said from start, or for that matter what the maker intended.
I choose to copy an existing bank-note since that to is an argument concerning the value of Art. The act of copying is, or certainly was in the post-modern era, a matter of artistic practice bordering to the justifications of Art itself.
And this bank-note depicts an image of a bridge that leads over the Kunming lake in Beijing to Nanhu island. This island is a representation of the Chinese fairy-land Penglai where the elexir of immortality is said to be found together with the 8 immortals.
The original bank-note
The original banknote has a denomination of One Fen (yi
fen "one
cent") and was issued in 1938 by the Federal Reserve Bank of
China.
The vignette shows the Seventeen-Arch Bridge located on Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace in Beijing.
The bridge, which was built
during the Qing (Ch'ing) Dynasty, provides a way to reach Nanhu
Island.
Nanhu Island was built to symbolize Penglai which was the mythical "fairyland" home of the eight Daoist immortals. Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who unified China in 221 BC, made several
attempts during his short reign to find Penglai since the "elixir
of immortality" was believed to exist there.
The Production
Test-prints on various papers and with various amounts of tea-pigment.
Cutting Chinese Rice paper
Making the pigment. Local Pu'er Tea is grinded
Pu'er Tea is made from the original tea tree and is considered to be the best and most original tea from Yunnan.
In ancient time this tea was also used as, or insted of, money.
The print was made with silkscreen at the TCG Nordica guest stuido.
Silk was for a very long time the largest and most important product of China. Also silk was used as, or insted of, money.
As binding medium together with the tea pigment was a semi-transparent silk-screen color base used.
The base made the color fade as it dried, but gave a good structure.
To bring back the color to live an oil was needed to be added after the print had dried.
Cutting out the bank-notes
Each print was a double two-sided print
The color was brought alive with poppy-seed-oil.
This oil, and averything made of poppy, was forbidden for a long time in China.
The reason for the prohibition, and the reason for me to use it, was that it is associated with the production of opium.
Each bank-note was sprayed with a mixture of poppy-seed-oil and water.
To fixate and make smooth each one was hot-ironed.
The original bank-note has two traditional signet stamps.
The stamp I used was a translation of my name into a Chinese name (it´s meaning and similarity in sound)
Stamping of 200 bank-notes
The original bank note has a red number stamp that probably represents editions.
My bank-notes were all stmped with an individual number each from 001 to 200.
100 of the bank-notes were presented togehter nailed to the wall.
Theses 100 could be purchased individually.
The cost of each bank-note was calculated to 1/200 of my total cost of the project.
The 100 bank-notes numbered 101-200 was presented in a stack.
The price of the stack was set to half of my costs for the entire project.
(below the stack is the sculpture "Offer" )
The total cost for this project was based on the following costs:
Materials for testing in Sweden
Tools for printing
Materials and tools for transportation
Materials bought in Kunming
Travel to Kunming and back to Sweden
Visa application
Vaccination costs
Rent of studio in Kunming
Rent of appartement in Kunming (2 weeks)
Loss of three weeks income in Sweden (350 SKR/hour)
Total costs multipled with 35% ( fee to TCG Nordica in event of sale)
Total cost in Chinese Yuan
67 065 ,61 Yuan
giving each bank-note the value of
335 ,32 Yuan