"Why Is Reality the Way We See It?" The Person Who Kept Asking Became an Artist

"We live on a flying sphere. That's a crazy thing," says Alicja Kwade.

On December 17, 2017, the Yuz Museum opened its last show of the year: the first solo exhibition in Asia by Alicja Kwade, a Polish artist based in Berlin.

Kwade appeared at the opening tour in a black suit, patiently fielding questions from visitors about quantum physics and Schrödinger's cat.

Kwade was born in Poland in 1979. Her father ran a gallery, her mother studied culture, and she grew up surrounded by art and artists. She drew for years, and her parents expected a lot of her. "I'd pretty much decided to be an artist by the time I was five," Kwade told QDaily.

At 19 she entered the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2008 she won the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture, Europe's most important sculpture award and its richest, and the world began to notice her. Two installations drew attention then. One was Coal (Union 666), made in 2008: coal briquettes wrapped in 666 sheets of gold leaf — in German slang, Kohle, the word for coal, also means money. The other was Kwade's Palette, from 2006, a shipping pallet made of costly red mahogany.

The Piepenbrock jury's verdict on her work: "a rather rich use of concept, technique and material."

The prize put Kwade among a closely watched group of young European artists roughly her own age — the German artist Michael Sailstorfer, the Swedish artist Nina Canell — who share an interest in nature, time, space, and even the machinery of belief.

Kwade builds from ordinary things: stones, copper, mirrors, glass, clocks, machines, household appliances. She pours what she takes from physics, astronomy and philosophy into the work of pulling those objects apart, showing the viewer a state they are not usually seen in.

Saga (Logarithmic Spiral), a group of large installations, uses glass, wood panels, sheet iron and copper wire, all bent to calculated curves, to form a set of sculptures of varying heights.

Bending and arrangement make these everyday materials strange. Yet a force spreading outward from a center is common enough in the nature we live in — the Earth circling the sun, ripples widening from the point where a stone drops — which is what the title points to. (Take a fixed point, multiply it out through a formula, plot the values in a vector coordinate system, and you get the elegant spiral that winds outward from the center, ring by ring.)

"I try to observe what makes up the reality in front of us. I mean, we live on a flying sphere. That's insane," Kwade said in an interview. "We're all animals, and our heads are small. So I think it's a wonderful thing to try to work out exactly what situation we're in."

The Chinese title of Kwade's Yuz Museum show, 《格物致新》 — roughly "examine things, arrive at the new" — is an inventive rendering. The English original is Rereason: the word "reason" with "Re" stuck in front. It carries on what Kwade has always done, interrogating the phenomena, objects and standards of daily life.

Kwade first came to Shanghai for this project about a year earlier. By then the Yuz Foundation already owned five of her works, and all five had to be in the show.

That, in Kwade's words, made hanging the exhibition "a little difficult." But she wanted to push its theme higher. So besides adding the Orbit series, she had her Japanese assistant, with her help, paste a ring of tiny clock hands around the walls of the entire gallery, each angled clockwise toward one of the 12 hour positions. Timekeeping by the circle became timekeeping by length. At intervals along the wall, the artist marked how much time that stretch of distance stood for.

"Take the cup of coffee in front of you that costs 20 yuan. Why is it 20 yuan? Because I decided it and you agreed. Agreements like that are everywhere in our lives. Time is an agreement too — someone set the rules and most people agreed to them. What I do is mix agreements of different kinds together, so that we look at the thing again. Here I've mixed length and time — in other words, I'm trying to explain time through length," Kwade said.

The show fills a rectangular gallery on the second floor of the Yuz Museum, and with one outdoor piece it comes to 24 sculptures and installations.

Below is QDaily's conversation with Alicja Kwade on the day the show opened.

Q: Do you like the world as it is now?

A: No. On one hand, I think we're going backward — politically, and in other ways. We took a few steps forward at one point, then some lunatics in business showed up and things got very bad. We've slid back, and that's sad. But on the other hand, I feel lucky to be part of this era. It's a kind of accident, and there's a great deal in it that is out of the ordinary. So I think we should see that: we've been given the chance to exist here, to witness everything in front of us.

Q: Who's your favorite artist?

A: It depends on the situation and my mood at the time. But in general I've always loved American artists from the 1970s — Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson. Gordon Matta-Clark in particular had a huge influence on me when I was young.

Q: What do you read?

A: A lot. I love reading quantum physics — physicists like Feynman. I've been reading his lectures on physics lately, and they're unbelievable. I also read philosophy, all kinds of it, including modern philosophy. Freud, Kant — a lot of Kant — Descartes, philosophy books of every sort.

Q: Do you remember your first work? What was it about?

A: Very clearly. It was called Me It's Another One, made around 2000. A photographic work, two portraits. The story behind it is that I happened to find a photo of a girl in a magazine, and I and all my friends thought she looked exactly like me. So I struck the same pose she had and took a photograph of myself. Side by side, the two pictures look like the two of us staring at each other. Nobody who saw them could say for sure which portrait was which. Even earlier I made another photograph: I shot the LED lights in my home on a long exposure, which made the place look like outer space.

Q: When you look back at your early work now, do you reject it, or judge it some other way?

A: I often feel lucky that what I make now hasn't changed much from what I made when I was young — even though the medium has changed several times. In college I liked photography, because I had no money to make large installations and a camera was easy to borrow from the school.

Q: When you set out to make a work, how does it all start?

A: I read a lot and do research online. Usually I find a small subject inside a big theme and research that. Then I draw a lot of sketches, and when I finally finish one I'm happy with, I roughly know what I want to make. Then I send the sketch to different fabricators and work out with them whether it can be built, because I can't make large installations myself. I can barely make anything (laughs) — those things are either too big or too heavy.

Then, once the fabricators understand what I'm after, they tell me what's possible and what isn't. That's when I have to revise. But as I've built up experience I've picked up a lot of technical knowledge, and now I mostly know what can be done and what can't, so there's less to revise.

Then comes the building. I work with five to 10 different companies, and the people in my studio help arrange all of it. In the end the piece comes back to the studio for adjustments to the details, and it's more or less finished.

Q: You follow physics and mathematics. Does today's science and technology have any concrete effect on the work itself?

A: Yes. But that doesn't mean I want to be a physicist. I could never be a physicist. The more I understand of physics and philosophy, though, the more they become a source of inspiration and bring an entirely new perspective.

Q: How do you turn that interest in science into artistic form?

A: On that point I'm glad I'm an artist. I take inspiration from this knowledge, and for me inspiration is interest, and it is also asking questions. What my work is actually saying isn't about form — though form matters too, it's a kind of talent. But in the end I want the work to be direct. I don't like saying too much. I want every element in a piece to be there for a reason. Take the Orbit series: the size of the orbit depends on the size of the stone. There isn't much I can do about it. The size of the orbit is set by the stone at the top, and the other way round, the size of the sculpture sets the size of the stone.

I'm always looking for forms that can be explained plainly, to serve as the main elements in a work. One of my pieces, for instance, is made of copper. Copper is a material we use constantly today, in all sorts of electronics; it's a medium for carrying information. That's why I didn't use steel or wood or anything else. I want a solid reason behind every choice I make. But art is often mysterious, you know. Some things you can't explain. They were simply there.

Q: So when you revise a work, what do you base the decision on?

A: First, if a plan needs too much revising, I'd rather drop it. But most of the time I compromise a little, because I run a fairly large studio and often, for budget or other reasons, I have no choice but to give ground. I do make small models, though — 1:10 or 1:20 models that I make entirely on my own. When I'm making them I need to be completely alone.

Q: Have you ever found it hard to turn an idea into a form of expression?

A: A language of expression isn't something that forms in a year or two. Through the whole process I've been trying to get the message across more simply, more directly, with nothing extra, and at the same time with a certain elegance.

That's why you may see something minimalist in our work. I want it to stay as pure as it can. What usually happens is that when I'm clear about what I want to do, I don't need to agonize over adding this element or that one. That only happens when you aren't sure what you want.

The cover image and any images in this article without a credit are courtesy of the Yuz Museum.