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Real Live Commercial
This is a performance-based installation centered around a chair designed and crafted by the artist. During the exhibition period, the artist commits to a durational performance: for seven consecutive days, three hours each day, he sits on this chair and engages in one single action—reading. The action is deliberately constrained. After taking a book from the chair, he commits entirely to reading, attempting to maintain or perform an uninterrupted, focused state of concentration.
The chair is placed atop a pedestal, which includes two simple compartments—one on each side. The compartment on the right is constructed to resemble a display case or vintage television. A smartphone is fixed to the upper-right corner of this space, displaying a looped video recording of the artist’s reading session from the previous day. This creates a layered temporal dynamic between live performance and recorded presence.
Through this setup, the artist presents two modes of viewing:
When the performance is ongoing, the live scene—combined with the video embedded in the base—produces an illusion of a real-time commercial, inviting viewers to reflect on the authenticity and redundancy within the act. It provokes questions aligned with the exhibition theme “Garbage Time”, as defined by the context of Raum 214.
When the artist is not present, the chair initially appears to be a sculpture with a base. Upon noticing the embedded video, however, the chair and book begin to read as advertised products—tools presented within a media context.
The artist deliberately refrains from attributing symbolic meaning to the chair’s form, preferring instead to highlight the contradictions that often arise in advertising videos—such as unequal information exchange or misleading condition descriptions. He argues that an “artistic” chair should not be comfortable to sit on—which, ironically, makes it unqualified as a product.
© Hai-Ning Huang, All rights reserved.