LEE WEN
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    • Bibliography
    • Interviews >
      • Huang Zhiming/Open Ends
      • Woon Tien Wei/Performance Researchwa
      • Iola Lenzi/Shifts
      • "Modern Art Reveries" Cheah Ui-Hoon
      • Artlink/Interview2014
      • BLOC TALK >
        • Beauty Is A Battle
  • Collectives
    • Artists Village/FOI/RITES
    • Independent Archive
    • Black Market International
    • Eternal Network international >
      • Call Of The Red
      • We Here Spend Time : Jason Wee & Lee Wen
      • A Clockwork Pisang
  • IDENTITY
    • Journey Artist's Statement >
      • "We are 'perfurbing' here" March 2008
      • "Will the real Singapore art please stand up?" Dec.1999
      • "If you see a performance artist, kill him", 1997
      • Lexicon Of Dissent
      • Sustaining Alterity in the Times of R(v)apid Changes.
      • How To Change The World Without Really Trying
      • Open Letter to the Nation of Josef Ng's
      • Letter to Alan Oei
      • Return to Daydreams >
        • Iola Lenzi/Shifts
    • Journey Of A Yellow Man >
      • Journey of a yellow man No.2
      • Journey of a yellow man No.3
      • Journey of a yellow man No.4
      • Journey of a Yellow Man No.5: Index to Freedom
      • Journey of a yellow man no.6
      • JYM No.9: Trees Resurrection
      • Journey No.11: multi-culturalism
      • Journey No.15: Touching China
    • More China Than You[我比你中国] >
      • More China, Manchester
      • More China, Rome
      • More China, Tokyo
      • More China, Cheng Du
      • More China, Suzhou
    • Ghosts Stories >
      • Ghosts Stories, Tokyo
      • Ghosts Stories, Kwang Ju
      • Ghosts Stories, Mexico
    • Stagger Lee >
      • Stagger Lee
    • Re-imagined Self >
      • Mirrors In The Dark
      • Picasso & Me
  • Interactive Art
    • Ping-Pong Go Round
    • World Class Society
    • AIM: Raffles
    • Chewing Gum Paintings
    • Give Peace A Chance Redux
    • Art vs. Art
    • Freedom, Service, Hope >
      • Freedom, Service, Hope #1
  • Revisits
    • Give Peace A Chance Redux
    • Anthropometries
    • Zen For Clay
    • Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps)
    • COSMOS: Currencies OfferingS Move Over Sky
  • Contexts & forms
    • Drawings (as Renewal) >
      • Drawings (as Endgame)
      • Songs Unsung
      • Portraits of Remarkable People and Tree
    • Strange Fruit
    • Unframed7
    • Nychthemer 1 & 2
    • Lifeboat
    • Dream Boat
    • One Stone, Three Forms
    • Paintings
  • Institutional Critique
    • I Am Not A Performance Artist >
      • I Am Not A Performance Artist/This Is Not A Work Of Art
    • Is Art Necessary? >
      • Is Art Necessary?
    • Anyhow Blues Project >
      • Diary of A Dead Artist >
        • Diary of A Dead Artist #1, Xi-An, China
        • Diary of A Dead Artist #2, Staglinec, Koprivnica, Croatia
    • Dog Man Domesticate
    • "Room For Nothing To Do" >
      • "Room For Nothing To Do #1
      • "Room For Nothing To Do #2"
      • COSMOS: Currencies OfferingS Move Over Sky
  • Texts
    • Lucy Davis/“Insects as Others”
    • Adele Tan/Art & the Iterative
    • Lee Weng Choy/Critical Response
    • Mitsu Salmon/Daydreamer
    • "Inside an Outsider's Dream" Huang LiJie
    • "A Performative State of Indefinite Duration" Bruce Quek
    • Chinese texts: 中文 >
      • Chng Seok Tin/黄人之旅--李文与行为艺术
      • 已死艺术家的日记 1 – 070513 : 英汉翻译:朱爱伦

Nychthemer

Nychthemer 1 and 2

Performance 24 hours X 2 duration

November 8-9 1996 and 1997

8 Oxford Street, Singapore

“Nychthemer” is a Greek word for a 24-hour cycle consisting of a day and a night. Not all cultures measured time that way. We are so used to the Greco-Roman calendar that we forget there are other ways of measuring time. The universal acceptance of the Greco-Roman calendar and measuring time as a 24 hour day was one of the first steps towards the globalize situation we are in today.

We experience natural and social changes in periodic sequences. Our concept of measuring time serves as points of references by which other experiences can be located. The nychthemeral rythym is most important for living organisms. Our human rhythms of taking nutrition at meal times, sleep, body temperature and physiological functioning also has a cycle related to the nychthemeral rhythm, behaving like an organic clock. However this may have been affected our concrete feelings for time and distance, due to different or changed conditions of modernization or technological advances. For example, shift work duties affecting our meal times and sleep patterns, jet travel resulting in jet lag.

On an open field, I walked in a circle for 24 hours from sunset to next day’s sunset. One year later, I buried myself up to my waist at a spot on the same field for 24 hours. I was exploring my body and the environment I was in for a 24-hour cycle. The first time I was constantly moving, very slowly though. And one year later I was in a fixed position. Graphically, with my body I was drawing a circle first and then doting the center of that circle a year later. But it was not only a Cartesian question for me.

It was a physical trial experienced between sunsets. When I did the first part of walking in a circle, I did not know what I would do in the second one, except that I will do something at the same place one year later. One of the reasons that motivated me to do this performance was the increased bureaucratic difficulty of organizing art and especially performance art in Singapore. I wanted to do something without having to go through that. I distributed photocopies of a hand drawn pamphlet to friends and did the performance in my backyard garden. I was not worried about whether I had an audience or not. People came at whatever time suited them.

2. Dream Boat.

Picture
Werkleitz Biennale,  

Tornitz & Werkleitz, Germany, 1998
http://www.werkleitz.de/events/biennale1998/text/cat/wen2E.html 

Dream Boat  

 Lee Wen´s performance had an emerging factor of performance art which is considered almost criminal in other arts. What the situation is going to be, which is then brought to the light of day, and decided on the location just before the event. In this way, he did something else than what had been announced. The problem many performance artists are having is, that the presence in the place of the event determines the form of the performance, except if the performance creates the place of the event and that in any space.

 He is shivering.

 The small river Saale, windy, fleeing clouds with short breakthroughs of sun. 

 Continiously shivering.

 Various short beginnings out of the audience, then diving back into it. Then he was standing at the edge of the dyke in an upright positioned zinc bath tub (which we already know). He had a piece of meat in his mouth, an oversized tongue, hanging out, started to shake it, stronger and stronger until it fell out. The bath tub had something of a sarcophagus. The way he stood in it, the tongue hanging around his neck, the head strechted out, bird-like, Egyptian, any second the tub could tip back over. He stepped out of the house, his head covered with pages of a newspaper, breathing heavily, holes torn out for the eyes and the mouth, taking a wooden spoon, putting the handle in his mouth, lighting a candle, attaching it to the spoon, standing in the tub again, the silhouette, a part of the face, the edge of the tub and the spoon with the candle, removed the newspaper from his head, with the calmness immanent to the archaic.

 The candle did not go out despite the wind, on the spoon, standing on the grass.

 Undressed, completely.

 Yellow paint rubbed on, spread over the body, standing in the sarcophagus again, then taking the tub like the shell of a turtle, yellow shaking legs, and moving from the dyke to the banks of the river. The tub put into the river, more lying than sitting, drifting, spinning, rowing with the hands, myth of origin with yellow man. 

 What archaic-poetic images have, they touch quietly.

 Boris Nieslony

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  • ABOUT
    • Curricullum Vitae/bio
    • Downloads
    • Links
    • Videos, Films, Moving Images
    • Bibliography
    • Interviews >
      • Huang Zhiming/Open Ends
      • Woon Tien Wei/Performance Researchwa
      • Iola Lenzi/Shifts
      • "Modern Art Reveries" Cheah Ui-Hoon
      • Artlink/Interview2014
      • BLOC TALK >
        • Beauty Is A Battle
  • Collectives
    • Artists Village/FOI/RITES
    • Independent Archive
    • Black Market International
    • Eternal Network international >
      • Call Of The Red
      • We Here Spend Time : Jason Wee & Lee Wen
      • A Clockwork Pisang
  • IDENTITY
    • Journey Artist's Statement >
      • "We are 'perfurbing' here" March 2008
      • "Will the real Singapore art please stand up?" Dec.1999
      • "If you see a performance artist, kill him", 1997
      • Lexicon Of Dissent
      • Sustaining Alterity in the Times of R(v)apid Changes.
      • How To Change The World Without Really Trying
      • Open Letter to the Nation of Josef Ng's
      • Letter to Alan Oei
      • Return to Daydreams >
        • Iola Lenzi/Shifts
    • Journey Of A Yellow Man >
      • Journey of a yellow man No.2
      • Journey of a yellow man No.3
      • Journey of a yellow man No.4
      • Journey of a Yellow Man No.5: Index to Freedom
      • Journey of a yellow man no.6
      • JYM No.9: Trees Resurrection
      • Journey No.11: multi-culturalism
      • Journey No.15: Touching China
    • More China Than You[我比你中国] >
      • More China, Manchester
      • More China, Rome
      • More China, Tokyo
      • More China, Cheng Du
      • More China, Suzhou
    • Ghosts Stories >
      • Ghosts Stories, Tokyo
      • Ghosts Stories, Kwang Ju
      • Ghosts Stories, Mexico
    • Stagger Lee >
      • Stagger Lee
    • Re-imagined Self >
      • Mirrors In The Dark
      • Picasso & Me
  • Interactive Art
    • Ping-Pong Go Round
    • World Class Society
    • AIM: Raffles
    • Chewing Gum Paintings
    • Give Peace A Chance Redux
    • Art vs. Art
    • Freedom, Service, Hope >
      • Freedom, Service, Hope #1
  • Revisits
    • Give Peace A Chance Redux
    • Anthropometries
    • Zen For Clay
    • Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps)
    • COSMOS: Currencies OfferingS Move Over Sky
  • Contexts & forms
    • Drawings (as Renewal) >
      • Drawings (as Endgame)
      • Songs Unsung
      • Portraits of Remarkable People and Tree
    • Strange Fruit
    • Unframed7
    • Nychthemer 1 & 2
    • Lifeboat
    • Dream Boat
    • One Stone, Three Forms
    • Paintings
  • Institutional Critique
    • I Am Not A Performance Artist >
      • I Am Not A Performance Artist/This Is Not A Work Of Art
    • Is Art Necessary? >
      • Is Art Necessary?
    • Anyhow Blues Project >
      • Diary of A Dead Artist >
        • Diary of A Dead Artist #1, Xi-An, China
        • Diary of A Dead Artist #2, Staglinec, Koprivnica, Croatia
    • Dog Man Domesticate
    • "Room For Nothing To Do" >
      • "Room For Nothing To Do #1
      • "Room For Nothing To Do #2"
      • COSMOS: Currencies OfferingS Move Over Sky
  • Texts
    • Lucy Davis/“Insects as Others”
    • Adele Tan/Art & the Iterative
    • Lee Weng Choy/Critical Response
    • Mitsu Salmon/Daydreamer
    • "Inside an Outsider's Dream" Huang LiJie
    • "A Performative State of Indefinite Duration" Bruce Quek
    • Chinese texts: 中文 >
      • Chng Seok Tin/黄人之旅--李文与行为艺术
      • 已死艺术家的日记 1 – 070513 : 英汉翻译:朱爱伦