人类发展的步伐Size: 143 x 106 x 61cm
Medium: Curved polished metal (mat)
Edition: 20 + 4 AP
The great rift cracked open. It spread, propelled by the convection currents upwelling from the mantle where two tectonic plates took their leave of one another. The land rose up. The climate grew drier. The once dense mantle of towering tropical hardwoods dwindled, receded. Trees became stunted, scattered and sparse. They developed acrid, bluish leaves and sprouted thorns to conform to the changes in this increasingly hostile environment. A dilemma confronted the arboreal creatures: climb down and forage for food on the ground or die, since one lone tree does not sustain. But this added to the peril of the nocturnal stealth attack in the trees by slinking leopards, that of prowling lions, howling hyenas and scowling wild dogs, not to mention competition with the odious baboons for the slim pickings available in the form of insects, fibrous tubers, reptiles and small, squeaking mammals. But climb down they did, and thus was the first step taken. Most perished rapidly but a very, very, very few - different from and considered malformed by the rest – withstood the grim test. Legs lengthened, craniums swelled, arms, teeth and jawbones shrank. Spines straightened. Increasingly redundant appendixes started to kill. Wisdom teeth became a life-threatening torment.
The creatures learned from the anteater's tongue to place a stick in a termite mound and withdraw it crawling with the crunchy, plump amber treats they so relished. Thus was the tool born and the second step taken.
The torrid time came. Drought blistered the land. Lightning bolts zapped tantalisingly just over the horizon to tease cracked, swollen tongues with the life-giving promise of the monsoon rains. The toying cloud wrack adanced, retreated. No relief came. A bolt blasted a spiny acacia to bits. The flickering flames mesmerised the creatures. They watched rapt as the flowing, streaming, all-engulfing plasma devoured the boughs. They saw the eyes of their enemies gleaming like baneful coals in the night. For the first time, they saw fear in those eyes. This was the Awakening. They saw a shape writhing in the flames, a being like themselves but different, of a higher kind, hanging from a cliff, persecuted by a great vulture for this gift, and they knew they were his children. Emboldened, a creature hefted a burning branch, shook it, swung it, brandished it. He stalked towards the encircling ring of greedy, glowing, yellow and green eyes. They winked out, shambled away into the night, and these third and fourth steps became footprints in time on a stairway to the stars . . .
. . . and there is no more concise or compelling recapitulation of this transfiguration than Li Dazhi's encapsulation, Anthro Steps, which avers that the road to paradise is paved with compromise and adaptation, and that not even we – with our grandiloquently genosuicidal tendencies - can stop the advance because it has now developed such a momentum of its own as to have outgrown the human race. This work elates and uplifts with its pure simplicity that implicitly utters infinity and the apotheosis of Homo-sapiens sapiens' divinity. How fitting then that this perfect exposition of the human condition should have found its expression in China, the one nation that has gifted humankind with more Anthro Steps on the upward path than any other.
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