"CHICAGO - Other than a brief introductory email exchange, I knew nothing about Tongji Philip Qian when I visited Alloyed Commitments at the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts. Based on the solo exhibition, curated by Andrew Witkin, I would describe Qian as a conceptual artist whose practice takes place at the intersection of legibility and illegibility, purposefulness and futility, while working within pre-established blocks of time - something he consciously shares with the late Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara."
"Rows of folded, stacked black t-shirts lay on the floor of a narrow, cordoned-off alcove. On each shirt was a date printed in white. The formatting of the dates, all written in English, was not uniform (some months were written out, others abbreviated; in some, days preceded months, and vice versa). This lack of consistency can be read as a comment on Kawara's series Today, begun in 1966 and comprised of more than 2,000 oil paintings whose content was the date on which the work was started and completed."
Tongji Philip Qian works at the intersection of legibility and illegibility, purposefulness and futility, operating within pre-established blocks of time. The practice evokes On Kawara’s date-based system while deliberately introducing inconsistencies and doubt. Perfect Days consists of stacked black t-shirts printed with dates in varying English formats, refusing uniformity and highlighting procedural fallibility. Humor functions as a tool to unsettle conceptual art’s seriousness and to undermine strict self-imposed rules. The work emphasizes both intentional structure and moments of undermining or failure, creating a tension between rule-following and self-sabotage.
Read at Hyperallergic
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