Unmask 'Space Cadet' Dasheng meandering his way from outer orbit

Size: 140 x 170 x 85cm
Medium: Polish metal with mixed textile mediums and foam
Edition: 20 + 4 AP

Human space exploration properly began when China kicked off its space progam 700 hundred-odd years ago, when an adventurous eccentric named Wan Hu strapped 47 rockets to a chair, ignited the fuses, sat down and blasted off into history. In the process he became China's first 'taikonaut' and, incidentally, the world's first astronaut. One is also tempted to credit him with having invented performance art at the same time. He certainly took it to new heights, anyway. That the Chinese always seem to get there first is by now axiomatic, and Unmask, remaining faithful to this tradition in this their rendition commemorating this event, likewise dare to go where no one has gone before. And although he was never seen again, Wan Hu's bold stroke provides a fitting model for Unmask to emulate in this work, which reclines, poised like the great sage himself must have been, tensed, and set to shoot off into unknown nodal coordinates on the space-time continuum, transiting through worm holes and tracing the twisting skeins of cosmic tendrils and threads to explore the uttermost limits of being and unbeing, where primordial Cosmos and Chaos pulsate and thrust in a relentless contest for mastery of the All in the untime before time, ere the stars kindled into raging life and the eternal rhapsody struck up to whirl the galaxies dancing off like dervishes in their dizzy, scintillating gyrations.

The title to this work derives from the ancient legend of Chang'e, a beautiful young maiden who, desirous of fleeing her overbearing husband, Houyi, stole a fairy potion which when drunk enabled her to fly to the Moon, where she remains marooned to this day, lonely but free. Small wonder then that China's proposed Moon mission should adopt this theme as its leitmotif, or that Wan Hu and Unmask should also strive to follow along the glorious path blazed by this audacious celestial beauty.

This work, which comes forged straight in the searing blasts of quasars and tempered in the annealing jets of pulsars, reverberates with the titanic concussion of the Big Bang, and serves to admonish that change and transmutation are the norm from which none may deviate, or do so at their peril, for stasis is stagnation. Insistently, it bids you gaze up and ask the stars, 'Am I evolving quickly enough?'


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