'Re-education through Inquisition' Size: 76 x 88 x 160cm x 3
Medium: hand carved and polished metal
Edition: 20 + 4 AP
Nowhere did torture as an art form reach such rarified heights of delicately exquisite refinement as in feudal China. The engines, methods and devices for the genteel infliction of chastisement in Old Cathay were legion, ingenious and diabolical, with each specified as the punishment for a stated offense.
The reprobate and recalcitrant were thus stripped, whipped, dipped and then ripped. They were flogged, dogged, clogged, scourged, purged, pickled, tickled, severed, skewered, slivered, de-livered, diced, sliced, scorched, torched, chained, sprained, brained, framed, blamed, maimed, splayed, flayed, hacked, racked, stacked, squeezed, teased, diseased, caged, staged, pilloried, posed, denosed, embered, dismembered, castrated, defenestrated, penetrated, paraded, upbraided, bored, gored, torn, shorn, worn, de-eared (and then later cleared), strung, hung, hanged, defanged, denailed, untoothed and impaled in myriad quaint and picturesque rites that drew eager throngs of afficionados in appreciative applause of this acme of performance art.
Cognoscenti of this genre favoured in particular a device fondly dubbed the 'wire chair', in which the victim was strapped naked in a foetal position, then wrapped in a wire net through which the skin bulged out through each mesh. The executioner would lop off one inch-sized bulge of flesh each day, in a stylised ritual that was as much excruciating psychological torment as physical. Sometimes, the victim would languish for up to one year. It was in fact this very punishment inflicted on captured British soldiers in the Second Opium War that drove Lord Elgin to order the Rape of the Summer Palace as a means of exacting vengeance against the decamped Emperor Xianfeng, but that tale is told elsewhere.
In celebration of this proud tradition of artful sadism, then, Shi Jinsong crafts a chair that resonates within the hearts and minds of all of us who have ever been put on the hot seat, and reawakens those traumatic childhood memories of the peremptory summons to the headmaster's office, or the adult trial-by-ordeal represented in its modern exegisis by the human resources evaluation, which enforces strict orthodoxy with far more rigour and ruthlessness than the Spanish Inquisition ever could or did. It reminds us of all those times of waiting, sitting on chairs studded with tenpenny nails: waiting for the call by the interviewer; waiting for the phone to ring with the beloved's voice at the other end; waiting to hear the fate of nearest and dearest in jeopardy.
Shi Jinsong's inspired resort to counter-ergonomics thus echoes the agony all have suffered, pining away on the hard, unyielding, chafing chair and waiting for the redemptive miracle that in many cases will never come. It's waiting for M. Godot, seated on tenterhooks; the minnow, waiting for the snapping pike to strike.
Yet this piece is nevertheless replete with hope: the hope of the torture victim for reprieve or oblivion; the hope of the Lotto player for the cool million; the hope of the scapegrace for the last school bell; the hope of the damned for a pass out of Hell. As the Count of Monte Cristo advises, 'Wait and hope.' And that is the message this piece murmurs to us, the message that allows us to cope when all of life's furnishings seem to come pre-equipped with sharp edges.
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