Beijing Project n.34 Hao Nan 郝楠

Hao Nan 郝楠 organised meditation sessions of fifteen to thirty minutes for the staff, using an ancient rock as a catalyst. He then held several conversations with the production manager and the plant manager to outline an impossible scenario: stopping production for a day, or a week, of meditation.

This provocative proposal questioned whether disrupting production could be legitimate if it allowed the staff to explore a personal and collective, intimate and even spiritual dimension of not-doing. His work sets up a dialogue between the Marxist critique of human alienation in capitalist production and the Daoist tradition, in which people seek a more natural, humble and balanced way of life.

From the artist’s statement: “I want to explore the possibility of a dialogue between the Marxist critique of the alienation of human beings in the capitalist production system and the meditative isolation of an individual in emptiness, through the contemplation of a Mesoproterozoic sedimentary rock. I aim to build a moment of silence and stillness in which the workers can turn inward. How do we understand the efficiency-driven industrial mechanism when we face a substance more than a billion years old?”

Hao Nan