Damao’s artistic practice

  • Landlessness (无地性): The condition of being stripped of a permanent base or geographic anchor, turning the state of displacement into an open field for infinite, non-contingent possibilities.
  • The Industrial Contour（工业轮廓）: Mass-produced objects and artificial boundaries (such as stacked stainless-steel bowls or turf crevices) act as physical frameworks that force the body into non-referential confrontations.
  • Manufactured Order (被构筑的秩序): The artificial spatial and social structures—typified by curated commercial hubs like modern bookstores—that simulate direction while quietly disciplining the crowd.中产阶级通过购买工业标品来安排生活秩序，这种对“美学与精神秩序”的追求是被商业与生产机制预先设定好的（被动构建）。
  • False Certainty (虚假的确定性): The illusion of stability provided by binary frameworks, rigid paths, and hyper-designed environments, which disguise the underlying anxieties of modern obsolescence and displacement.统一模具制造的标准化物品给予了家庭一种“稳定、可控、安全”的假象。
  • 斐波那契秩序：Fibonacci orders
  • The Blind Man’s Compass (盲人的罗盘): A central metaphor for existential navigation. It represents an instrument of orientation whose visual logic is rendered useless, forcing the subject to navigate spatial folds through intuitive, grounded, and non-visual presence.
  • The Blind Navigation（盲人导航）: In works like The Blind Man went home in the dark, a cobalt blue path serves as a lifeline between historical weight and transient “foam.” The blind man does not confirm external order through vision; he navigates through internal, tactile presence.
  • Present-yet-absent observer:（不在场的在场观察）Individual ties within the industrial fractal order are obscurely masked by perspective in the shadows of the screen, amid the interplay of spatial parallelism and folding.在工业分形秩序中的个体羁绊，于空间平行与折叠的交互中，被透视遮蔽在屏障的阴影里。不在场的凝视：：An absent gaze
  • No Particular Person / Without a Specific Subject（无对标的对象）：精准对应“没有确切的此人”，强调肖像并非指向某一个具体的、现实中的特定个体。Industrial Countenances / Faces工业面孔。
  • Artificial Rockery（假山）are a perfect metaphor for ‘mimicking nature / artificially constructed order’ in an artistic context. Juxtaposing them with ‘industrial standard products（工业标品）(stainless steel bowls)’ creates a sharp contemporary critique—industrial products have become the ‘man-made rockeries’ （人造岩石）in the spiritual habitat of modern people.
  • 真实的存在感：作品将这些物品从功能中抽离、分形重构，打破了假性确定性，把“存在感”从对工业标品的被动依赖，转向个体在无根现实中“即时生根发芽”的自发觉察。
  • this tension finds its definitive metaphor in The Blind Man’s Compass(盲人的罗盘):. A compass promises absolute orientation, yet in the hands of a blind navigator, its visual precision becomes entirely abstract. The modern subject, surrounded by hyper-regulated commercial landscapes and mass-produced industrial items, navigates space much like this sightless wanderer. Caught between the heavy, unyielding mass of historical memory and the ephemeral pink “foam” floating between survival and sacrifice, the individual is forced into a state of landlessness (无地性). Through the interweaving of performance, installation, and canvas, Damao deconstructs this manufactured certainty. By folding spatial boundaries and embracing the observer’s perceived absence, the work reveals that true navigation in the modern age requires abandoning rigid, top-down maps. It is only by acknowledging our blindness within these pre-designed orders that we can begin to feel our way through the dark, discovering authentic presence in the crevices of an alienated world.
  • 后工业时代数据关系中的个体觉察：
    EN: individual awareness nested within post-industrial data relations
    DE: individuelle Wahrnehmung im Gefüge nachindustrieller Datenbeziehungen
  • 不在场的在场观察者：present-yet-absent observer