Tongji Philip Qian: if i may (my favorite is TEN SECONDS YUNNAN RICE NOODLE)
If I may (to partly borrow the title), process matters for Tongji Philip Qian. As does materials and concepts of which he uses to make art looking at what comprises time that become markers of the many steps forming his practice to pose specific questions as you walk into the space itself to consider its omnipresence as symmetrical or binary, indexical or irreverent.
And he keeps receipts to freely itemize, categorize, and organize what is his inventory, a visual record of and through action now on paper as performative act. So somewhere between Tehching Hsieh, On Kawara, and even Sol LeWitt, the daily grind, the similarity encompassing everything everywhere all at once that we barely notice is positioned on the wall for us to take into account, often marked, sometimes redacted, as graphs and charts to indicate the incremental and interstitial of ordinary life.
Minutes repeated, each different, yet still the same in essence, that accumulate as hours into days and so on and so forth until years pass by. The aggregate of which represents the finite as infinite. All triangulated and mapped as collection of the above per text through information or data as instructions decoded.
Photo credit: YoungSun Choi