I spent five weeks in spring 2024 at the Acentric Space art residency based in Zhujiajiao - an ancient town located in the Qingpu District of Shanghai.
While exploring the old streets I stumbled upon a peculiar object at one of the old local Tao temples, and that was a Luopan Compass - a fascinating artefact that has been used for divination and orientation purposes for thousands of years. I wanted to create my own surreal version of such a beautiful mechanism, except, of course, with watercolor and a lot of painting and cutting and glueing and even some woodwork and light sculpting.
And heavily washed with surrealism, obviously, otherwise why even do it at all.
Here's a little documentary I've put together, sharing my thoughts on the process and beyond.
Over a course of four weeks I have created over a hundred elements that were designed, painted, cut out and re-assembled using a glue gun.
I used rough symmetry and mainly some basic compositional instincts to arrange those on a rotating round wooden base (the idea was to keep the front mobile which would allow for changing of the patterns at every turn).
Of course, with every experimental project challenges occur and there are risks of imperfection/failure - learning to accept that became a part of that project actually, and at the end I was just tired and happy having birthed such an... unusual artistic object, even though it didn't work exactly as I planned.
It was donated to a friend of mine who is actively planning a forward-thinking educational centre for kids, hopefully my compass will live to be observed by many young curious eyes in the future.
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