He Chi: Ode to Spring

Magician Space presents Chinese artist He Chi’s Ode to Spring as the second project in Antechamber, an independent space run by the gallery, dedicated to artists with edge-cutting practices and intellectual depth in unrestricted experimentation. Echoing the first project by Liu Ding, which explored how Chinese intellectuals inscribed their spirit into the contours of their times, He Chi focus on individual consciousness emerging from the collective experience in China from the 1970s to the late 1980s.

Ode to Spring is an installation composed of 131 ceramic tea pitchers, small vessels that were widely used in southern China from the 1970s to the late 1980s. Often adorned with motifs of literati landscapes (shan shui), birds and flowers, or auspicious symbols, these objects belong to a transitional period marked by the end of the Cultural Revolution and ushered in the country’s shift toward a market economy. It was also a time when individuals began to emerge from the constraints of collective life, as ordinary desires and domestic intimacy were only beginning to resurface—a brief window that faded quickly just before the full onset of globalisation. He observed that these tea pitchers, typically used by just one to three people, embodied a self-sufficient spirit that echoed this shift, offering modest foundations for imagining private life.

To He Chi, tea evokes the breath of spring. In his memory, those years in China carried that same atmosphere. People gently tasted the flavour of life through the limited designs of these small tea pitchers. Unlike the large tea trays that emerged in the 1990s that carried the dreams of commerce, while today’s designer teaware functions as a performative statement of the self. These modest vessels reflect an unintentional and unselfconscious emergence of individuality.

All the tea pitchers in Ode to Spring come from He Chi’s own collection, dating from 1973 to 1989. The work serves as a tribute to a bygone era and evokes a threefold metaphor of spring: the sense of spring experienced by the tea drinker; the renewed collective vitality of the early Reform era in China; and the artist’s own personal spring, formed during his first sixteen years in northern China as he began to develop a sense of self and of the world.

“Of Spring” / He Chi
Wangen sah’ ich verblühn, und die Kraft der Arme veralten. 

—Hölderlin

Of spring, / what more can we know? / Many hurry their way through winter, / plucking shards of glass, / collecting bricks and stones, / clearing ashes, digging up spoil, / searching for springhead and envisaging its flow. / Take a deep breath and then a shallow one. / Stretch legs and open chest. / Cleanse blood… / …Of spring, / what more can we know?

Upon noon, / you leave the cattle to rest and go home, / setting up a sanctuary for yourself: / chop firewood, build a fire, boil water and brew tea. / The aura that nurtures personality / permeates under the eaves / where swallows quarrel. / What you find fragrant, / we find bitter – / salt, for example. / …Of spring, / what more can we know?

It’s been years since my senses became numb, / my spirit barren, and my material existence, cold and hard. / I’ve grown fond of square dancing and late-life romance; / of things that are within easy reach; / of evidential research and participation. / Through thick and thin, through wind and rain, / I am trapped in the mundane. / My seasons never change. / I’m alive, but unlike those who have seen spring, / I’m stripped of the concept. / …Of spring, / what more can we know?

Poem translated by Wu Chenyun