Who can know, an artist's courage, Dayton live together from where. Just as you can not know the power of a moth to smash the glass. Also as the Phoenix Nirvana bath, died to life, what is the final helplessness and death in the face of self-help, or make death the last beauty choice. He is a remarkable film art photographer whose reputation in the world is like the first morning sun in the Eastern Woodlands. He is a fine, pure film director, a weed in the film that does not matter to us, and is a tree or a beam in his directorial woods. These new and unusual "photography works" are, of course, a burst of flamboyance of the accumulation and talent of his long artistic career. He can clearly reveal his sigh and dissatisfaction with himself, others and the world of art, Reborn craving and calm and rhythm of preparation.
As a result, destruction began; destruction became a new starting point.
    The first half of the year, whether as a cinematographer or a director himself, has been questioned or denied in these exhibited works. Distrust yourself, deny yourself, see the destruction of the past as the beginning. All achievements, reputations and aura have been regarded by him as a bundle of new ways to go forward. Only getting rid of, regenerating and creating is the birth of a new art. Rather than his remanufacturing with the aid of a shot, his rebuilding would have ruined the shot; rather than his rebuilding as a transboundary one, he would rather say that his rebuilding would destroy all the boundaries of art, photography, film, Chinese painting, oil painting, East learning, Western learning; all these, all the boundaries of art and the possibility of technology, are in his hand, randomly pinched, material distribution and fermentation, has finally become such a shocking "no border" Made for
    Perhaps, in his silent heart, there has long been a tumultuous wave of tumbling buildings and a "borderlessism." All equipment, technology, modern infinitely updated technology, are just his reproduction, reengineering art color plate at random, homestead, tune the expected color. Even the latest technology in modern metal and new glass panels, but also his re-creation of the moonlight, and the summer flowers. Photography, photography of the metal tripod, in his place, is a mix of dance legs; light and shade of borrowing, deployment, but also the rhythm of the music and musical notes beeps.
    Quietly standing in front of these more modern or postmodern works, there is a fiery hot foreleg footsteps, in your mind and heart, wind and water attack, attack around. These works, vivid and fragrant, have the potential of a myriad of answers from the re-creation to the new creation. It can be said that new ideas and neo-doctrines can also be said metaphors and non-metaphors, parable and non-allegorical, symbolic and non-symbolic, direct access and cross-trail gardens. It can even be said that it is nothing, but there is a man named Gu Xuan Wei Wei has become a new type of mountain, a different kind of artist; or an artist called Gu Wei Chang Wei, has become let us more Unexpected stranger. Do not say his great, outstanding words, just think he is this new face, let us familiar with the unfamiliar, strange apprehension, but in the apprehension and sigh, think of it, the generous, generous. Putting aside the veil of ideas and opening the curtain of the doctrine, I saw these secrets of these works from the modern western art to the oriental reality. At the end of that trail, the great reality of China was immediately touched by touches of shadow, sensible and very materialistic and real. Gold and silver, coins, light and dark, material desire, ideal, desire and hope, beauty and ugliness, the reality and the future, were all changed lens, light color, mark the condensed details, like the Forbidden City, Great Wall, After the door was disassembled and reorganized, it was inscribed into a traditional snuff bottle, or it was painted on the back of a Western-style necktie in terms of the country's rivers, streams and future. After that, the detail that was broken up and cut into a new world has become a huge future possibility. Within that pipe, or on the back of a tie, there is one reality on the one hand, and an art of eternity on the other. Here, however, he has just turned it upside down, giving it a completely new abstraction, making it a modern and postmodernistic concept of pure conception. On the other hand, when we find out and see the hidden and torn pieces of modern art Crack in the gap, leaving the reality of the window and the door. Push the door into the door, or open the window leaves, walking through the trail of traction and implied, also suddenly saw the reality of the vast distortion; desire to the brilliant evil flower; the field is full of history and oppression of our hearts today the largest Numbers and values. Emotion finally reduced to a statistic. Soul has been purchased by the size. Of course, we can also stand by the window or stand in the middle of the path through which the doors of these works pass, peel off the metaphor, one by one, one by one, one for one, two for one. Everything stays on the stage of the show, allowing the imagination to crystallize into an intuitive look at Mr. Gu, the artist, an ordinary person like us, who is using the legs of a tripod for the country, reality, future, Out of a dazzling and abstract dance.
What do you want us to see?
He said nothing. You say what you see, he just smiled silently; you say you did not see anything, he is still so smiling and silent. The silence here is not the silence of the work, but the mute of the noisy dinosaurs, the scream of burning and the scream of silence. Is to explore the realm of art falls in the real world the most relaxed gesture, the most exquisite seductive, the most brilliant reading statement. Is a new realm in realm! And this new realm, not because you read the polygamy and the realm on the window or the path, but the artist, coming from destruction and destruction, standing on suspicion, negating the re-creation and creation , And finally found and completed belongs to him - only belongs to his expression of creation -
    A gateway to the new world.
    To say that this new realm is borderless or new boundaryism is important. It is important that this connection be connected with life and reality. The connection of the East with China, such as the solidification and eternal light after the lightning strikes the earth, becomes impossible Copying the eye-catching, Lenovo, fantasy, imagination in a new realm of rooted; so that the new realm of the artist deep in the art itself and the reality of the people and the reality of the world, the new silence of anxiety and smile Uneasy, and not the same ironic, inclusive and forgiving of all the love of the new art and a real artist.
    In the face of a new world, in the face of the anxious person who loves the world, that person who regards art as religion, who says burning as a matter of silence and smile, is thank you; thank you!
    Thank you for giving us this new world!
                                                                                 September 18, 2014

The Mystery of Matter and the Subversion of Pattern — An Analysis of Works by Gu Changwei

   Film director Gu Changwei began his art of image in about 2013. In his macro photographs of a hundred-yuan banknote, the banknote loses all its original appearance, with each part taking on an abstract pattern—as in microcosms observed under a microscope. Some look like swirls, some show an arrangement of lines, and some appear to be minimal works of art—with faint signs and occasional colors only. There are also near-monochromatic planes, on which the mark "100" is only visible when looked at carefully. Overall, abstraction is the main desired effect and appears the underlying theme.The banknote, whether as the subject of photographing or filming, has nothing to do with the "abstraction" of painting. Gu's works exist as "abstraction" though, and they are of "abstraction" of otherness. This "abstraction", created by machinery, represents a challenge to the concept of abstraction itself, and the evolution of abstraction now is at a historic turning point. On the one hand, the abstraction of painting already has no potential for development, and on the other, popular culture is changing the logic of abstraction development; the two aspects are interlinked, and Gu stands just in the link between them. The evolution of abstract art has logic of its own. In the Western history of modern art, abstract art was at the core of modern art, and its logic of development represented the logic of entire modern art. The termination of abstract art implies the end of modernism. "It seems that it has so far been proved that the irreversible nature of the art of painting resides only in two basic rules or standards: the plane character and its delimitation; following the two rules alone is enough to create an item that can be perceived as a painting, and so a piece of canvas that is stretched or nailed in the wall already exists as a painting—not necessarily a successful one though." This statement of Clement Greenberg means, in fact, that given the conditions for the art of painting, its irreversible nature is ultimately realized by the absolute plane, and that the realization of this nature also means the end of abstraction. That is, abstraction, if there are other possibilities for it, would be divorced from the nature of painting, i.e. painting itself. 

   Michael Fried, too, talked about the same issue, and said: "A painter, once he has accepted the basic premise of modernism, would become aware of particular problems that arise from previous art, and his acts would no longer be groundless but imposed on him. He may make mistakes when weighing context up. But so long as he is convinced of the existence of the issue, and of its importance, he would face up to that context which he cannot disregard and must undergo no matter what, and the result of his forcing his way through it would be his creation of art." In the context of modernism, abstract art would inevitably come to an end, and a typical example is minimalism. Minimalism doesn't mean visual and formal value, but the significance of concepts. Greenberg said that "a piece of canvas that is stretched or nailed in the wall already exists as a painting", but it would not just an unsuccessful painting—it would be unique. Abstraction, therefore, must change so that it is divorced from the context of modernism.

   Postmodernism is a visual crisis of modernism, which, if unable to integrate with popular culture, would die away. "Theatricality", which Fried criticized strongly, is right a change of minimalism towards a post-modernist form, and is reflected more in installations, surroundings and behavior. Such change is not merely the end in form of modernism, but it also portends the loss of its elite properties. Modernist artists proclaim themselves legitimate inheritors of traditional elite culture, and their art is more and more divorced from reality, from the masses, and like the expression of its form, remains nothing but absolute uniformity and abstruseness. The death of this elite nature is sure to be attended by a legitimate substitution, which occurs not within modernism, but across entire culture, including postmodern mass, popular, commercial and consumption culture, the entire new landscape and the new avant-garde culture. This substitution may also take on two forms. One is turning mass culture into elite culture, with a typical manifestation being pop art and post-industrial visual representations like advertising, cartoons, packaging and trademarks entering the field of high art. The other is employing mass culture's mode of production for creation of high art; that is, turning machine-made commercial images—through reuse and reproduction—into forms of high art, which involves conceptual change and visual effects. Minimalism ostensibly seeks the absolute simplicity of an abstract form, but in fact, its use of monochrome and repetition already indicates the form of commercial images. American artist Ellsworth Kelly enlarges the flatly applied monochrome to the size of large painting and then exhibits it in the way a painting is exhibited, making it hard to tell whether it is a minimalist abstract work or a billboard without an image on it. The conversion of mass culture is effected by artists, whose strategy is to create a substitution for modernism given the conditions of mass culture.

   Unlike modernist artists, postmodernist artists usually possessed the status of mass culture, and they affected the connection between modernism and postmodernism and consequently the conversion from modernism to postmodernism through their personal work experiences. The working language of mass culture was the basis on which they created the schema of postmodernism, and without such experience they would have been unable to give birth to a new schema. In the case of Andy Warhol, for example, his career as a commercial artist made him unable to use parts and segments of commercial images to make false impressions of high art, substituting images (ready-made) for the absolute plane of abstract art. In a sense, the mass culture's mode of production and the means of machine-enabled production were prerequisites for creation of postmodernist images, and daily, commercial and entertainment images were their sources of production. Importantly, this was not a continuation from high art to commercial art, but a similarity in continuing high art under postmodern conditions. This is the impression that Gu's works give.

   Pop art is a typical postmodern art; it directly borrows images in mass culture and, given the values of contemporary society, turns mass culture into high art. Gu's art is different: he continued modernism and created a new abstraction under postmodern conditions. Perhaps we can call his works "post-abstract". His works possess all conditions of abstract art, with their abstract structure mainly reflected by combined lines and patterns composed of motion and lines. In his work titled F-X057Y019, for instance, the entire image is formed by straight and oblique lines in irregular arrangements; the vertical straight lines, rather than extending down straight, have bends and breaks, and the oblique lines which cross the straight ones are irregular too, as if forming meshes of varying sizes together with the straight lines. Though machine-generated, such irregular combination appears to have artificial signs, and looks as if drawn randomly, no composition, no centripetal structure and extending infinitely. Abstract expressionist works (e.g. those by Jackson Pollock) are known as "all-over compositions", spreading and extending outwards in all directions and defying logocentrism, which paves the way for monochrome and extreme simplicity. As Gu's works are not purely of planes and single colors, he didn't try to link his works to abstraction in abstract expressionism, but to acquire the legitimacy of abstraction and proceed to turn common things into high art. The "irreversible nature" of the art of painting is ultimately reflected by the medium and effects that stem directly from it. This is probably the highest level of abstraction that Greenberg could expect to occur. If we disregard its machine properties, Gu's F-X057Y019 work could be a perfect piece that Greenberg would have desired to create, but it was just his machine (photography) that brought about the artificial effects of the abstract image which instead is derived from a popular, commercial and consumptive ready-made image. High and low culture, elite and mass culture are well blended in the work. This abstraction created with a Film director Gu Changwei began his art of image in about 2013. In his macro photographs of a hundred-yuan banknote, the banknote loses all its original appearance, with each part taking on an abstract pattern—as in microcosms observed under a microscope. Some look like swirls, some show an arrangement of lines, and some appear to be minimal works of art—with faint signs and occasional colors only. There are also near-monochromatic planes, on which the mark "100" is only visible when looked at carefully. Overall, abstraction is the main desired effect and appears the underlying theme.The banknote, whether as the subject of photographing or filming, has nothing to do with the "abstraction" of painting. Gu's works exist as "abstraction" though, and they are of "abstraction" of otherness. This "abstraction", created by machinery, represents a challenge to the concept of abstraction itself, and the evolution of abstraction now is at a historic turning point. On the one hand, the abstraction of painting already has no potential for development, and on the other, popular culture is changing the logic of abstraction development; the two aspects are interlinked, and Gu stands just in the link between them. The evolution of abstract art has logic of its own. In the Western history of modern art, abstract art was at the core of modern art, and its logic of development represented the logic of entire modern art. The termination of abstract art implies the end of modernism. "It seems that it has so far been proved that the irreversible nature of the art of painting resides only in two basic rules or standards: the plane character and its delimitation; following the two rules alone is enough to create an item that can be perceived as a painting, and so a piece of canvas that is stretched or nailed in the wall already exists as a painting—not necessarily a successful one though." This statement of Clement Greenberg means, in fact, that given the conditions for the art of painting, its irreversible nature is ultimately realized by the absolute plane, and that the realization of this nature also means the end of abstraction. That is, abstraction, if there are other possibilities for it, would be divorced from the nature of painting, i.e. painting itself. Michael Fried, too, talked about the same issue, and said: "A painter, once he has accepted the basic premise of modernism, would become aware of particular problems that arise from previous art, and his acts would no longer be groundless but imposed on him. He may make mistakes when weighing context up. But so long as he is convinced of the existence of the issue, and of its importance, he would face up to that context which he cannot disregard and must undergo no matter what, and the result of his forcing his way through it would be his creation of art." In the context of modernism, abstract art would inevitably come to an end, and a typical example is minimalism. Minimalism doesn't mean visual and formal value, but the significance of concepts. Greenberg said that "a piece of canvas that is stretched or nailed in the wall already exists as a painting", but it would not just an unsuccessful painting—it would be unique. Abstraction, therefore, must change so that it is divorced from the context of modernism.Postmodernism is a visual crisis of modernism, which, if unable to integrate with popular culture, would die away. "Theatricality", which Fried criticized strongly, is right a change of minimalism towards a post-modernist form, and is reflected more in installations, surroundings and behavior. Such change is not merely the end in form of modernism, but it also portends the loss of its elite properties. Modernist artists proclaim themselves legitimate inheritors of traditional elite culture, and their art is more and more divorced from reality, from the masses, and like the expression of its form, remains nothing but absolute uniformity and abstruseness. The death of this elite nature is sure to be attended by a legitimate substitution, which occurs not within modernism, but across entire culture, including postmodern mass, popular, commercial and consumption culture, the entire new landscape and the new avant-garde culture. This substitution may also take on two forms. One is turning mass culture into elite culture, with a typical manifestation being pop art and post-industrial visual representations like advertising, cartoons, packaging and trademarks entering the field of high art. The other is employing mass culture's mode of production for creation of high art; that is, turning machine-made commercial images—through reuse and reproduction—into forms of high art, which involves conceptual change and visual effects. Minimalism ostensibly seeks the absolute simplicity of an abstract form, but in fact, its use of monochrome and repetition already indicates the form of commercial images. American artist Ellsworth Kelly enlarges the flatly applied monochrome to the size of large painting and then exhibits it in the way a painting is exhibited, making it hard to tell whether it is a minimalist abstract work or a billboard without an image on it. The conversion of mass culture is effected by artists, whose strategy is to create a substitution for modernism given the conditions of mass culture.Unlike modernist artists, postmodernist artists usually possessed the status of mass culture, and they affected the connection between modernism and postmodernism and consequently the conversion from modernism to postmodernism through their personal work experiences. The working language of mass culture was the basis on which they created the schema of postmodernism, and without such experience they would have been unable to give birth to a new schema. In the case of Andy Warhol, for example, his career as a commercial artist made him unable to use parts and segments of commercial images to make false impressions of high art, substituting images (ready-made) for the absolute plane of abstract art. In a sense, the mass culture's mode of production and the means of machine-enabled production were prerequisites for creation of postmodernist images, and daily, commercial and entertainment images were their sources of production. Importantly, this was not a continuation from high art to commercial art, but a similarity in continuing high art under postmodern conditions. This is the impression that Gu's works give.Pop art is a typical postmodern art; it directly borrows images in mass culture and, given the values of contemporary society, turns mass culture into high art. Gu's art is different: he continued modernism and created a new abstraction under postmodern conditions. Perhaps we can call his works "post-abstract". His works possess all conditions of abstract art, with their abstract structure mainly reflected by combined lines and patterns composed of motion and lines. In his work titled F-X057Y019, for instance, the entire image is formed by straight and oblique lines in irregular arrangements; the vertical straight lines, rather than extending down straight, have bends and breaks, and the oblique lines which cross the straight ones are irregular too, as if forming meshes of varying sizes together with the straight lines. Though machine-generated, such irregular combination appears to have artificial signs, and looks as if drawn randomly, no composition, no centripetal structure and extending infinitely. Abstract expressionist works (e.g. those by Jackson Pollock) are known as "all-over compositions", spreading and extending outwards in all directions and defying logocentrism, which paves the way for monochrome and extreme simplicity. As Gu's works are not purely of planes and single colors, he didn't try to link his works to abstraction in abstract expressionism, but to acquire the legitimacy of abstraction and proceed to turn common things into high art. The "irreversible nature" of the art of painting is ultimately reflected by the medium and effects that stem directly from it. This is probably the highest level of abstraction that Greenberg could expect to occur. If we disregard its machine properties, Gu's F-X057Y019 work could be a perfect piece that Greenberg would have desired to create, but it was just his machine (photography) that brought about the artificial effects of the abstract image which instead is derived from a popular, commercial and consumptive ready-made image. High and low culture, elite and mass culture are well blended in the work. This abstraction created with a machine means repeats and imitates the abstraction in painting, but carries a different meaning—it is indicative of not an experience of painting, but an experience from a landscape. A landscape means an object between a subject and nature, which, comprised of countless man-made images, not only makes us far away from nature but let us lose the essence of nature and change to an object. To put in simple terms, we are reduced to the slaves of money. Gu's works seem to work as something that leads us to a pure abstraction, and they seem to reconstruct abstraction and minimalism but actually to let us enter a trap of the transformation of things in the reading of "paintings".

   A banknote, though small in size, gives Gu a boundless space of images. If we say that the work F-X057Y019 contains the author's intention—under the cover of an abstract image—to let us sink into painting reading and search for more possibilities of abstraction, then his other works implies a physical world in contemporary culture on the basis of abstraction. Due to the action of macro photography, the slightly raised patterns on the banknote reveal some weak light spots which give a sense of volume and which seem to hint at something—something unrecognizable but like a transition from abstraction to representation. If the abstraction is the divinity of some spirit, this representational hint points the representation in the abstraction to a secular world. Abstraction and representation are intertwined with one another as are easel art and notions, and if we are perplexed on the language of form, post-abstraction (representation) would become meaningless. The work B-X026Y019-A is, too, at the edge of abstraction, with slanting, short lines forming an irregular pattern in the middle of which is an abstract square that seems to hold a clue to the abstract status of the image. What fits this irregularity is the fact that the seeming lines are actually something raised above the plane, whose volume is revealed by light so that it changes from a pattern to an object, a ready-made object. This object is unrecognizable, and its composition relies on the foundation of abstraction, as if hinting at the relationship between abstract art and the ready-made object, as well as the abstraction created out of the ready-made object. Modernism is replaced here, and a ready-made object becomes a work of art as high and elite as modernism. If money is seen as the most common everyday item and its use represents the most basic daily behavior of man, Gu's works show a postmodernist world; by disregarding the distinction between art and life as made by modernism, he found a way for everyday items and behavior to enter art, beginning his art creation of postmodernism.

   There is no definite distinction made between modernism and postmodernism in Chinese contemporary art, and with Chinese society developing rapidly, tradition and modernity are being entangled and overlapping with one another, rather than broken through and converted in sequence. Gu's works target modernist issues, though they were created in postmodern context. His behavior itself is iconic in two main aspects. One is his behavior as a photographer. Though he acted as a film director and a photographer, photography, already the main source of image production, possesses the properties of mass culture itself. While creating abstract images ostensibly characteristic of modernism, he was in a game in which he was surprised by the amazing effects of the image of a banknote from photography. He could employ a machine and an everyday item to produce modernist effects, and through conversion, production and enlargement, create a visual space in which modernism and postmodernism overlaps with one another—in essence, a postmodernist living space. Besides, the use of a banknote to create postmodernist images also implies the potential function of a ready-made item, an important element of conceptual art. The importance of money is self-evident, and the key is the mystery it holds in secret as a special everyday item. A common hundred-yuan bill, Gu said, he used every day but had never noticed its form until he found, by chance, its macro photographs could reveal so complicated, rich and secret patterns. 

   The mystery of a bill makes human power give way to its magic power in a process of alienation and transformation in the nature of man. It seems that Gu wanted to explore the mystery of a bill, but he approached its interior from its surface, as if all the mystery was hidden in those abstract patterns. He revealed the inner form of the bill and uncovered its mystery. Modernist art, Greenberg said, is attached to capital by an umbilical cord of gold, but ostensibly stays away from money and secularity and pretends to be elegant.There are ways to move from modernism to postmodernism, but Gu's is unusual. He is not a painter or sculptor in a common sense, but an image maker in a particular sense who in his position sees things that general artists cannot see. Postmodernism is a visual crisis of modernism; that is, image production of mass culture will replace image creation of modernism, and that is what Gu has done. It is more important to note that, though a bill itself is not a product of mass culture, nor alienation or  transformation of things are postmodernist terms, Gu approached the interior of the bill by means of modernist images, through which the real-world function of the bill as a ready-made item is restored, achieving the expression of contemporary art.Yi Ying November 3, 2015    

Imaging Beyond Images 

-- A Hundred-RMB Bill through the Lenses of Gu Changwei 

My old friend Kong Chang’an told me: Gu Changwei took some pictures- pictures of a hundred-RMB bill taken with macro lens. Would you like to go see? I know that Gu Changwei has studied art, worked for the film industry as a camera operator, and established himself as an acclaimed film director. I was quite curious ---what perspective would a film director take when involved in making contemporary art? I have pictured all sorts of images since Chang’an told me about the hundred-RMB bill under macro lenses. However, when I visited Changwei’ studio, the photos he showed me were stunning. Even with the wildest imagination, it is hard to believe these unrecognizable images are the photographic remakes of the hundred-RMB bill, an ordinary and familiar object in our life.

Unique, original, and creative visual imagery taken from a common object and magnified with macro lenses is the artistic language of Gu Changwei. Money, highly “valued” in human civilizations, has become the core “criteria” in China to define and to assess the quality of life. Therefore, nothing can be more familiar than money to a Chinese people. These photographs alienate the image of an object that is the most common and worshipped. Except a few images of enlarged watermarks, some works are vaguely discerned and require a closer look, such as the image of Mao; some resemble abstract paintings, which do not seem to be two-dimensional but with intricate three-dimensional effects created by “multiple materials”.  Each work has its interest and character. There is a picture with patterns in bright red color; the central image is a circle, which surprisingly conveys a sense of depth and bears reminiscent of the waxed seal used on an important document in ancient China. That image is supposedly taken from the first button on the suit of Mao’s portrait; even the sewing thread of that button looks raised and uneven. In another photo, the images of that button on Mao’s suit, in various enlargements and sizes, are playfully arranged in the pattern like an eyesight examination chart. When the familiar hundred RMB bill is “deconstructed” into special and ingenious images, the feeling associated with the hundred RMB bill is also revolutionized through the new perspectives.  

This is a special point of view. According to Gu Changwei, one day he was holding a hundred RMB bill and thinking how familiar it had become from our daily usage. He then intentionally stared at it, played with it, and pondered upon it. In fact, at this moment, the hundred-RMB bill already became a subject of scrutiny, which is about beauty and thought without any practical meaning. Gu’s eyes, I can imagine, just like the lenses of the camera, follow his thoughtful mind, zoom into the subject, and then frame an astonishing “close-up” that “wins the hail from the audience.” This is the answer I’m looking for: a unique perspective and expression of a film director. From this standpoint, I could say that the way Gu uses macro-lenses originated from his long-time experience in handling “film camera”. In this exhibition, the artist’s special object installations and video installation will ensure another amazing visual experience for the viewers: the unfamiliar micro-universe of a familiar hundred RMB banknote. 

From here, the term “deconstruction”, coined by Derrida and hyped in recent years, comes to my mind. “Deconstruction” is popularized because of the highlighted implications of “destruction” and “dissolve”. According to my French friend, Derrida actually meant to underscore the meaning “analysis”. I know neither French nor much of Derrida’s theory. If the original intended meaning of “deconstruction” is more close to “analysis” like my friend said, considering the Chinese enjoy “interpreting” any implication/connotation, I would like to propose a term “interpreting-analysis” for “deconstruction”; “interpreting-analysis” is to focus on “analysis”, in another word, to “interpret” through “analyzing”. In the 1980s, a book titled Interpreting Analysis was published by Gu Dexin, Chen Shaoping and Wang Luyan, members of the renown “interpreting-analysis group” in Chinese Contemporary Art circle.  We can draw a comparison of approach between this book and Gu Changwei’s works. In Interpreting Analysis, three living human beings, that is, the three authors are transformed into statistic chart-like objects through boring and complicated computational formulas, interpretation and analysis. While Gu uses a different type of “interpreting analysis”, through which money, the merciless deity of materialism, is relieved from its nature, and the hundred RMB bill is transformed into a sensually attractive abstract painting. In this series of works, money is no longer money. 

Money is no longer money. Just like in Balzac’s well-known novel Eugenie Grandet, the father spends time in the cellar to play with his golden coins each day; the clang-clank sound of the coins is aesthetically pleasant to his old ears. In the well-known film The Million Pound Note, the million pound bill is also turned into a piece of artwork, symbolizing various money-generated absurdities in the secular world. By the same token, Gu Changwei tells another absurd story about money with different media but in the same comedic way. Li Xianting  November 20, 2014