Low-grade Fever - Text / Wang Heng
During a low-grade fever, one’s body temperature increases, but the body feels fits of cold. This is a shiver-triggering cold, which happens to resemble my perception of daily-life violence. From the death of a female worker in a refrigerated truck as she hitchhiked back to her home in Henan Province, to the exposure of an illegal trade of cadavers, and to the series of harrowing events over the past month or so, societal violence time and again challenges people’s limits of ethics, affects, and imagination with the cruelty. Whenever I leaf through news reports as such, I always sense a sort of coldness overflowing the screen and chilling me to the bones. The news would be soon washed over by new information; the events would be as quickly forgotten but they are bound to recur in similar forms. Inevitably, violence is naturalized, to which people become desensitized until turning blind. I try to represent such chilliness in my works, to conjure such “affective violence.” It differs from the bombastic, vulgar forms of cliched violence, not reliant on the vehicle of material matters. Rather, it is an image in itself, a cold, ruthless image that delivers a more straightforward truth.
低烧 - 文/王亨
人处在低烧状态时体温会升高，但身体感觉到的通常是一阵阵寒意。这种让人打颤的寒意，恰好类似我在日常生活中对于暴力的感受。从河南女工在冷藏车厢中死去，到非法倒卖遗体的事件被曝光，再到最近一个多月接连发生的恶性事件。社会暴力的残酷性不停的在突破着，人们的情感和想象的底线。每当我看着手机里的这些新闻报道时，总会感觉到某种溢出屏幕的浸骨寒气。因为消息很快会被覆盖，事件很快会被遗忘，类似的事情也一定会再次发生。不可避免的，暴力变得习以为常，人们的感知也逐渐麻木甚至视而不见。我试图在创作中去呈现出这种冷冰冰的，“感觉的暴力”。它与被再现物（刺激人，俗套）的暴力是相对立的，它也并不存在于被形象化的物体中。而是，它本身就是形象，一种冰冷的，无情的形象，一种更加直接的真实。
