One Buddha Two Systems

作品賞析

CHEN Long-Bin uses books as his creative medium. He “deconstructs” his books with an electric saw and then sculpts them into Buddha heads or heads of famous historical figures, so that these discarded books burst forth with a new artistic life. In One Buddha Two Systems we can see the outer form of the figure carved from book pages, with marble-like vein patterns. From the inside, we see the spines of the books with their titles, deliberately left visible by the artist. Chen believes that books are the record of human civilization, a medium for passing on knowledge, and an instrument for conveying thought. But nowadays books are becoming increasingly commercialized; add to this the invention of the digitalized book and we see that books have lost their original, pure intellectual nature. Aside from symbolizing the collapse of the prestige/authority structure of books, by “destroying books to create art” the artist is also making people think about media consumption and resource waste in today’s society.