“Clothing Project”, exhibited in September at this year’s Photo Shanghai, is a work created by one of Taiwan’s very few conceptual performance artists, Shi Jin-Hua. This project was originally conceived when he was an artist in residence at MoMA PS1 in New York, to measure the perimeter of the art institute’s building.
《穿量計劃》是今年9月于上海藝術影像展上展出的作品，由台灣極少數的觀念行爲藝術創作者之一——石晉華創作。這件作品是他在紐約MoMA PS1當代藝術中心駐村期間，以身上穿著的衣服測量PS1當代藝術中心的周長。
During the first phase of the project, he collected clothes donated from some of PS1’s staff and other visiting artists. He then numbered and tagged each article of clothing and put everything on one article at a time, photographing every step of the whole process: 77 photos for 77 pieces of clothing. In the second stage, he cut the cloth from all the clothing into strips, and stitched together a very long “cloth tape measure”. In the third stage, he used this fabric “tape measure” to measure the perimeter of PS1, which turned out to be 21 pieces of clothing.
作品的第一階段，他收集了PS1員工以及駐村藝術家们捐贈的衣物，逐一編號、穿著、拍照，77件衣物，77張照片；在第二階段，他將這些衣物剪成布條，拼接成一大卷“布尺”；第三階段，他用這個“布尺”測量PS1的周長，並得出其周長爲21件衣服的長度。
Clearly, for Shi Jin-Hua, the importance of this measurement isn’t in an abstract mathematical figure or hasn’t any kind of academic purpose. Jin-Hua has instead transformed the act of measuring into a corporeal sensation and an expressive, artistic act. His rather unique methodology isn’t limited only to “Clothing Project”, but often recurs in a lot of his other works, such as “Hugging Project”, “Pencil Walking”, “Searching Center and Boundary”, and so on.
顯然，在石晉華這裏，度量不再是數學上抽象的數字和學術單位，他將它轉化爲一個身體感受的數量。這一特別的方式，不僅是《穿量計劃》，更是貫穿了他多數的作品，例如《擁抱計劃》、《走筆》、《尋找中心與邊界》等等。
Born in 1964, Shi Jin-Hua now lives and works as an artist in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. When he was 17 years old, he started taking insulin injections to control his blood glucose level. Usually when one is first introduced to an artist’s work, his or her medical condition isn’t usually discussed. But when it comes to Shi Jin-Hua, one cannot fail to mention his diabetic condition. Because his life has been inseparable from the “body”, and the daily acts of “documenting” and “measuring”, much of the work he has made as an artist has centered around these three key words.
這位出生于1964年，現生活工作于高雄的台灣藝術家，17歲開始便注射胰島素並長時間使用血糖機紀錄血糖值。當我們介紹一位藝術家的時候，通常不會將其病例也列出來。但談到石晉華的時候，卻不能不提到他的先天性糖尿病。他的生命因此離不開“身體”、“紀錄”和“測量”這三個關鍵詞。他人生至今的諸多藝術作品也是圍繞這三個關鍵詞創作。
As a diabetic who regularly needs to keep a log of his body’s glucose levels every day, Shi Jin-Hua has also applied the idea of measuring data to try to interpret some of the other things he encounters in life. Through a medical condition, which also gave birth to his art, he has found an opportunity to share something of great personal value and meaning from his own life into his work.
一個要不停紀錄自己身體數據的糖尿病患者，用這種測量的方式維持自己的方式，也用這種測量方式诠釋生命與事物的意義。疾病帶來痛苦，也催生了他的藝術，讓他找到自己賦予自己生命意義與價值的機會。
