[RIP & READ|牍·读]

Rip and Read is a participatory art project by HE Wei that comments on the way information is digested and produced in contemporary society. By employing food as a main medium, the project attempts to form an analogy between the biological consumption and the intellectual intake.

When a bag of food stapled on the canvas is ripped off for eating and drinking, a piece of paper will come along with texts on its back side. The resulting tear on canvas reveals some more reports and news hidden beneath the top layer. The rip-and- reveal behavior indicates the fragmented manner in which individuals read and perceive nowadays, while the project also resonates closely with the topic of history and memory the current Chambers exhibition taps into, with the resin food resembling archaeological artifacts and the collective process transforming the canvas from a pixelated color palette to a textual collage, that is, fumbling through the scattered puzzles of the past, we restore and stitch them into a seeming whole.