On the occasion of his new solo exhibition at Lumen Travo Gallery, Ni Haifeng (1964, China) presents the installation "In the Labyrinth of Freedom", originally developed for the exhibition "Freethinkers" at the Amsterdam Museum in 2021.
If freedom is defined as the absence of external impediments to an agent of free will, how responsible are the wills to freedom to society at large? On the other hand, the concept of positive freedom, which holds that the freedom of an individual has to be mediated for the greater societal good, creates a slippery slope where freedom may easily slide into unfreedom.
Through a labyrinth of words, phrases, and visual forms, the exhibition attempts to interrogate the paradoxical nature of the notion of freedom, such as “forming one’s own idea,” the ideology of individualism, free will, or atomistic notions of selfhood.
The original installation comprised 268 flags, presented in various ways: hanging from the ceiling or stacked on a pedestal, they form a labyrinthine structure that the visitors can immers themselves in.
A flag is a symbol representing an idea or a particular entity. The phrase “rallying around the flag” tells us that flags possess the power of messaging, heralding, signaling, and identification, while “burning flags” or vandalizing flags often triggers emotional outrage, suggesting that flags are not merely representations but have become what they represent. By the same token, in this context, the flags that form the maze represent, herald, signal, and identify with various forces in the history of freethought and political phenomena.
The flags exhibited here are composed of words, phrases, and texts representing discourses on freedom from various ages, superimposed by the year in which they were uttered. Some of the flags represent short punching voices such as “of Human Bondage (1677),” “miserable laissez-faire (1892),” and “bare life (1995),” while others capture philosophical interrogations or intellectual ruminations, such as “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom (2001),” “History only suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom (1962),” and “Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism (1872).” Some others read as “Anti-Vaxxer (2021),” “We were born free, and will stay free, as long as I am your president (2019),” or ironically, “Enduring Freedom (2001)”, which is the name of the American military operation in Afghanistan. Across diverse eras with contradictory meanings, the discourses are not a representation of the history of freedom but indexes that call forth the history in which the discourses were once born, lived, inspired or rejected. In other words, history is not depicted but contextualized as a readymade, absent, yet integral part of the work.
By juxtaposing the discourses of freedom with the times they appeared, the project also conceptualizes history as a labyrinth.
The development of freethinking overlapped and coincided with the Enlightenment, the advancement in natural science, colonialism, and the rise of capitalism. History is full of contradictions, and the freethinkers were necessarily embedded in such contradictions. The maze of flags can be seen as murky historical waters for contemporary individuals to retro-navigate through and to reconcile the contradiction between ideas such as "men are naturally free and equal" or "break the chains of mental slavery" with those of colonialism and the slave trade.
The present is marked by the current public health crisis, ecological crises, neoliberal capitalism, laissez-faire, political correctness, surging populism, ultra-rightwing ideology, and post-truth politics, where the ideas of freedom are most forcefully disputed. The new resurgence of bigotry mingles happily with the late-capitalism permissive culture, and the traditional freethinkers, freed from their shackles of unfreedom, have lost the necessary enmity to transgress. In the age of social media, freethinking is mostly contested in the Brownian motion of free speech in the clamorous digital space. When everything can be said, nothing seems to be heard.
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Ni Haifeng was born in 1964 in Zhoushan, China. In 1986, he graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, now the China Academy of Art. He currently lives and works between Amsterdam and Beijing.
His work was recently presented in the group exhibitions: Moving Stories, Het Valkhof Museum, Nijmegen, NL (2022), Freethinkers, the Amsterdam Museum, NL (2021), From Revolution to Globalization, Museum M+, Hong Kong (2021), Object Love, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany (2020), Say it Loud, Bonnefontenmuseum, Maastricht, NL (2020). Rhizome, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2018). Dialogues, Manifesta Office, Amsterdam, NL (2017).
Selected solo exhibitions include: The Para-Textual, Gallery In situ - Fabienne Leclerc, Paris, France (2018), Asynchronous, Parallel, Tautological et Cetera, PearlLam Galleries, Hong Kong (2015), Vive la Difference, Gallery Lumen Travo, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2010).