100 Years in 1 Minute

In this realm, time becomes space. – Richard Wagner, Pasifal Hu’s project “100 Years in 1 Minute” consists of 1100 1-minute-videos, which are stored and displayed in thousands of grids, and each piece is a deconstruction of some master pieces of modern times. Hu compressed 100 years into 1100 artworks – as the metonym of human civilization and history in this period. Therefore, deconstruct art is to deconstruct the world we know. But these kind of devastating deconstructions do not lead to historical criticism. In artist’s opinion, they are just experiments: “like we degrade some common thing into some unknown objects in laboratory, we try to test the possibilities and consequences of combining visual culture memories of 100 years in 1 minute randomly.” When an artwork is surrounded by time and space, or history and system, its original status will be changed slowly. Artworks are not invariable, on the contrary, they will get distorted, changeful and older. The only unchanging thing is that everything will change. Sometime the more we destroy artworks, the further we abandon violence, and we’ll find the essential of art closer.