Nothing to Do with Me (2021) at SJTU, Song Difei

Some people say that artists should have the freedom to express themselves, and that if people pull this exhibition down just because it is morally unacceptable, it actually undermines the freedom of expression in art. But even if we put morality aside, I think this exhibition can hardly be called art. In my opinion, art is inherently critical. Art is an implicit critique of the degradation of human beings, as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno said. In an interview with Song Ta on BIEDE, Song Ta said that he had the right to tell the truth, and he felt particularly proud of telling the truth.

But in my opinion, he merely presented this social situation, rather than telling the truth. Because the truth is not the despicable social reality that we have seen in this exhibition. The truth is a state of goodness that we should achieve, not just a defence of this reality. Truth is not reality, on the contrary, truth is hostile to reality.

Photographic works, used for military training propaganda in Chinese universities, Anonymous, Jul. 2021.

Another inspiration for this project was that I was working on another project at the same time, that is, I rate my three roommates’ daily behavior during the military training. Because I want to ridicule the trivial and meaningless behavior of scoring each class and letting them compete with each other during military training.

The leaders of the school deliberately create a sense of competition and group honor to make the students who participate in the training become more obedient. Many of the rules are very boring, trivial, meaningless, and rigid.

For example, the person reviewing the photos actually has a bad aesthetic. The political workers of the military training troops must submit their photographic works to the old-fashioned counselors who do not understand photography. Many photos will be rejected for inexplicable reasons. For example, some classmates in the photos "have not enough frm eyes", "hair is too yellow" and so on. Any students who have obviously dyed their hair are not allowed to appear in the photos. The students who write propaganda articles were told to arrange the text in various patterns in order to cater to the weird preferences of leader’s.

At that time, I planned to continue this project for a semester or a year, to satirize the bureaucratic and formalistic phenomenon in the university. But then I discovered that in the past few days of scoring my roommate, there was a subtle change in the relationship between us. Although we all know that this is a joke, I feel that I still do harm to my roommate. So I told my teacher that I didn't want to do this project anymore. Then he asked me why I didn't do it? He also told me that he thought this project was fun and humorous, and if I don't mind losing three friends, I can continue to do it.

But I didn't think it was appropriate to hurt people like that just for making portfolio and then applying university. So I had a sudden thought at that time, could I turn Song Ta's work and my own previously suspended project, upside down, could I turn the target at myself? Although this project now is not really a harm to me.

If Song Ta’s work is reversed, if he let these 5,000 girls give his appearance a score, and then rank it in a list, maybe he will fnd this unacceptable. But he But he used art as an excuse to hurt other girls in this way.

The Score sheet and leaderboard for my cancelled project "Tiao Ranking List" (Tiao is my nickname), Jul. 2021

On Xiaohongshu, also known as Little Red Book，a social media and e-commerce platform，if you search for "score”, you can see a lot of people willingly asking others to score their looks. Some people will even pay two or fve yuan to ask strangers to score their own face, hoping to get an objective assessment of their own face.

So I wanted to present the above phenomenon. It's like this.

In this project, I asked some friends and strangers to edit my portrait photo according to their own aesthetic preferences. And I also organized a relay for editing images: I invited some friends to edit my photo, then forwarded it to the next person, and so on. Clearly, whether it's the increasingly outrageous and unnatural photos in "My Development History," or the photos that have been variously beautifed by diferent people, they're not in the least bit like my own image. During the course of this project, I discover some very interesting phenomena. I didn't intentionally remember who is the editor of the photo among these seventy-fve or so photos on here, but every time I saw a particular photo, I could still easily remember who had photoshopped that picture. Because most of the pictures are a little bit close to the look they present in their Social platforms like WeChat Moments, which can be called their ideal self.