Entity
Two Sites Sculpture
Shanghai, China
I often pass by this place and always see a huge Delete key, a very unique installation. I've never known why it's there.
It wasn't until I walked around to take a photo that I saw the back. I never expected the entire installation to be an enlarged keycap, with the structure on the back matching that of an actual keycap.
When I was about to upload the photo, I searched online and discovered that it’s actually a relic from the early days of Zhangjiang’s development, part of the "City in Progress: Zhangjiang On-Site" large-scale public art exhibition.
The following content comes from the artist’s website introduction:
Two Sites
2007 Site Specific Installation in Zhangjiang Road at Zhangjiang High Tech Park, Shanghai, China
7m height
“On-Site Zhangjiang” is a way of looking at Zhangjiang as a future urban model for high-tech innovation and production worldwide (looking out); “Zhangjiang On-Site” rather takes Zhangjiang as a Chinese urban area and observes the cultural situation faced by these areas of high-tech development (looking in).
The tension between these two urban modalities is the text for my creative concept. I sat up an installation in the empty space around the wall opposite the Zhangjiang Road, a space of urban construction and design, a temporary home of rural laborers—“enlarged DELETE key”.
It aims to express a tension between this unchanging fixture of the computer keyboard and humanity’s constant desire for innovation. It leads to a consideration of the dialectical relationships between “disappearance and appearance; destruction and construction” in this urban present progressive tense.