Frankie Zhang Bixiao

I find it particularly interesting when  I put Vibrant Matter, the book by Jane Bennet,  side by side to Mono-ha Artists work. I think it helps understand Mono-Ha artist and vice versa. One works as a visualised theory of vibrant matter and one becomes textual explaination of some of the art works.

For example Nobuo Sekine’s work demonstrates the vividness and the force of things that draw attention to one, in his flying rock piece that is phase of nothingness, He use the illusion of flying rock to awake Human's imagination, In Phase- Mother Earth the illusion of earth topology hints the vitality of earth.

In Koji Enokura’s Symptom series, he illustrates the tendencies of one self to become one in the world, as a part of the whole, the flow of vitality, to merge with the world, a part of the assemblage.  Where he urges to fit to the column, and when he is  drawn to the water, the floor, as if it's tension drawn him to it.

And Suga Kisho shows the relational factor using simple materials and demonstrate how one situation (or in Chinese word Shi) is created, the potential that results from the very disposition of things. In Law of Multitude, the relation between the pole and the film and the stones creates a assemblage, a phenomena of illusion of floating stone. In the Law of Peripheral Units, the stones tied to the rack by strings demonstrates dependency of things and different factors,  and the meaning that emerges as a whole by each actants relations to each other.