Hu Qingyan created the two works, “A Bundle of Bamboo No.1” and “A Bundle of Bamboo No.2”, by fashioning ‘bamboo poles’ from the root of the golden nanmu tree, which he then bound into bundles. He formed the work “Cloud” out of the same volume of marble as his own body. Both the 'bamboo poles' and 'clouds' created by the artist mirror his obsession with imitation. But his clay objects, which appear again and again only to vanish away, likewise reflect a keen awareness of this obsession. In “Narrative of a Pile of Clay”, clay is used to randomly copy objects observed by the artist. When a good imitation of the object assumes shape, it immediately becomes a ‘work’, at which point another object is formed, a process that goes on and on indefinitely. At the instant in which Hu Qingyan’s ‘unrelated objects’, to wit his ‘bamboo poles’ and ‘clouds’, are respectively fixed in wood, stone, and clay, the artist has already ‘revealed the ruse’, and yet “Revealing the Ruse” is not a matter of sheer cloddish ignorance, but is in fact quite deliberate.

- Text by Liu Libin