Beijing Project n.23 Wu Yuren 吴玉仁

Wu Yuren 吴玉仁 began a discussion with the production manager about granting one free day a month to workers who completed their tasks to high standards of quality and time. He planned a board to record people’s achievements and collect credits towards the free day.

Right after their talk, the production manager, Deng Zhixue, launched Open, a plan he had already conceived: on Fridays the workers could take free breaks and work in their own clothes.

The free day, however, proved impossible to implement because of working procedures: the company could not find a legal framework to grant a day off to a worker, manager or employee on the basis of a qualitative, non-productive standard. The artist and the production manager spent several official working meetings imagining how such a policy might be put in place.

The project is an important example of an interaction that led neither to a physical artwork nor to a change of rules. It was possible because of the conditions in which the department works, as a relational research unit. Projects like this one live in a zone between utopia and the absurd, as a challenge to the normal rules of behaviour inside a company.

Wu Yuren