Contemporary conceptual artist Tongji Philip Qian is challenging traditional approaches to conceptual art by introducing humor and self-undermining strategies into his practice. Unlike most conceptual artists who strictly adhere to their self-imposed rules, Qian deliberately subverts his own methodologies even while following them, creating works that exist at the intersection of legibility and illegibility, purposefulness and futility.
Qian's solo exhibition "Alloyed Commitments," curated by Andrew Witkin at the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts, showcases his unique approach to time-based conceptual art. His practice consciously echoes elements of the late Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara while introducing doubt and humor into conceptual art's traditionally serious execution.
The exhibition's centerpiece, "Perfect Days," is an ongoing project that began in 2023 featuring rows of folded, stacked black t-shirts displayed on the floor of a narrow, cordoned-off alcove. Each shirt bears a date printed in white, but unlike Kawara's famous "Today" series, Qian deliberately uses inconsistent formatting - some months are written out while others are abbreviated, and the order of days and months varies throughout.
This inconsistency serves as a pointed commentary on Kawara's "Today" series, which began in 1966 and comprised more than 2,000 oil paintings, each featuring the date on which the work was started and completed. While Kawara operated within strict self-imposed rules and always rendered dates in the language and format of the country where he made each painting, Qian embraces chance and inconsistency.
Qian's approach to "Perfect Days" exemplifies his openness to chance. The project originated when his wife told him about Today Clothing store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Qian convinced the store to periodically lend their stock, which he returns after including it in exhibitions. This reliance on external circumstances and availability opens conceptual art's traditional dependence on rigid rules, definitions, and measurements to new possibilities.
Another work in the exhibition, "Finding the Spiral Jetty" (2024), further demonstrates Qian's playful subversion of art world conventions. For this two-channel video piece, he attached two small cameras to his dog Grappa - one on his back and another on his belly - and let the dog run unleashed on Robert Smithson's famous earthwork that juts into Utah's Great Salt Lake.
The resulting video offers a funny and subversive homage to Smithson's iconic work, providing a fresh and unlikely perspective of the earthwork. Viewers never see the Spiral Jetty in its entirety, only herky-jerky close-up views projected on two screens placed on the gallery floor as Grappa runs over the sculpture's rocky terrain. The work transforms the viewing experience of this canonical piece of land art into something both intimate and chaotic.
Qian's "No-risk Hours" series, ongoing since 2019, demonstrates his fascination with temporal constraints and bureaucratic absurdity. For each work in this series, he creates a drawing during the hour saved when clocks are turned back on the first Sunday in November for daylight saving time. Each drawing is accompanied by a notarized affidavit attesting to this fact, though Qian notes the irony that notaries are supposed to sign documents without reading them to protect privacy.
This approach marks a significant departure from first-generation conceptual artists who "dissected and analyzed language's limitations with the gravity of a brain surgeon," as the exhibition materials note. Instead, Qian does the opposite, using humor to add layers of meaning while offsetting the didactic solemnity often associated with conceptual artists like Mel Bochner and Joseph Kosuth.
Qian's artistic process involves both addition and subtraction, with his approach to negation and alteration varying across different bodies of work. This methodology reflects his bi-cultural awareness, drawing from his Chinese origins - he was raised in Shanghai - and his years living in the United States, where he currently teaches at the University of Chicago.
His aesthetic is rooted in the intersection of calligraphy and writing. In some series, he draws both vertically and horizontally, creating densely layered asemic works that deny traditional self-expression through acts of writing and erasing. Through time-based limitations, such as producing drawings during his lunch hour, he conveys time as a form of imprisonment that cannot be escaped.
The modest size of the paper sheets Qian often uses further challenges assumptions about conceptual art, particularly regarding the necessary scale of a work and what constitutes success. While traditional conceptual artists, with the exception of Sol LeWitt, typically could not create failed pieces due to their adherence to self-imposed rules, Qian operates differently.
Even when following rules, Qian undermines himself through erasure and negating marks. His process recalls lines from Samuel Beckett's 1983 novella "Worstword Ho": "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." By embracing the possibility of failure and self-sabotage, Qian opens conceptual art to new possibilities and challenges its traditional boundaries.
"Tongji Philip Qian: Alloyed Commitments" continues at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago through December 7. The exhibition presents a compelling case for how contemporary artists can both honor and subvert established art historical traditions while creating space for humor, chance, and failure within conceptual art's traditionally rigid framework.
