“A huge, room-sized container flew over my head. I was breathing in the dust swirling in this decades-old, enormous factory that covered several square kilometers. A non-stop and static rumbling noise resounded in my brain… I became cautious. I could not help but speculate about the stories behind such an enormous manmade ‘object’. I had to film it. It has such a mysterious power that comes from nowhere. It is not even similar to the natural forces that drive the evolution of species in order to survive in difficult environments. There are always reasons behind people’s actions, but I always think things are not this simple. Are these reasons the true reasons? I thus imagine a group of people, and their story that no one knows.” Lu Chunsheng described his experience like this in our conversation about History of Chemistry. We started to surpass reality and imagine something else — the experiencing of other worlds.

If we say Lu Chunsheng is amused by how the world is not explainable, and the absurd nature of people’s wills that direct their actions, then his works should also not be seen as any kind of explanation of the world. His works represent events, but all the social references that these events may have are peeled away. I see multiple possibilities of interpretation in History of Chemistry — the end of the confrontation between men and their zoning represented in History of Chemistry may be seen as a deterministic prophesy of the future, but it may also just be a state of mind that is separate from the “events”. And this state of mind, may it be melancholic or excited, is never a conclusion of an epoch.

And I believe that Lu Chunsheng always sees the ruins of the future behind all the flashes of reality.

(Hu Fang)